I was as fit as I've ever been going into 70.3 Durban. At 13k on the run, I stopped at a public bathroom and my race was over. The problem wasn't my fitness. Here's what it was.

I lined up at the start of 70.3 Durban two weeks ago, as fit as I've ever been in my 10 years as a triathlete. My training had been consistent, my numbers were there, and mentally I felt grounded and clear. On paper, this should have been one of my better races.

It wasn't.


After a controlled swim and bike, I built into my run stride, but at 13k I had to stop and use a public bathroom. I'll spare you the details, but it wasn't pretty and it basically ended my day.

I finished, but the result didn't represent what I'd trained for.
I've been reflecting on the race for the last two weeks, and I wanted to share some thoughts. Not so much as a race debrief, but because I think there is something about performance in relation to fitness and training that we often miss.

What allows physical capacity to become usable performance?

I had the physical capacity to race 70.3 Durban well. The performance on the day didn't line up. I've been wondering what sits in the gap between physical capacity and usable performance?

The short answer is: a lot more than fitness.
Physical capacity, your VO2 max, your threshold, your power output, your aerobic base is potential.

It's not performance.


Performance is what happens when that potential gets expressed, in a real environment, under real conditions, on a specific day.

And more often than not, performance or the expression of your capacity depends on things we don't train for. Here are a few I've come up with in the last two weeks:

1. Technical Automaticity

How ingrained are your skills and processes? Do you need to burn cognitive energy to perform on race day or can you go on autopilot and hit your targets?

2. Adaptability

Do your skills and fitness hold up when conditions change? What do you do when there is a current on the swim, when the wind changes direction on the bike, when the temperature cranks up on the run? Can you adapt your mindset and strategy in real time based on the situation?


3. Available Executive Function

Do you have the mental bandwidth to make good decisions, to regulate your emotions and to respond intelligently to what's actually happening in front of you?

4. Self-Efficacy

Not generic confidence, more context specific belief. Do you trust yourself to execute this, here, now, against these people, with these stakes?

The list is longer, but if we can get these things in place, we have a much better shot of converting physical capacity into performance. When they're not, you can have the fitness in the bank and still not access it.

What happened in Durban

My fitness wasn't the problem. Neither was my technical skill, my pacing, or my mindset on race morning. I was ready.

The problem actually started four days out.
I made a choice to be more social with family and friends in the lead-up to the race. I loosened my grip on the things I normally control:

  • What I was eating, when I was eating, what I was drinking.
  • I ate things I wouldn't normally eat in race week.
  • I drank tap water instead of bottled.
  • I enjoyed myself.


By Saturday, my stomach was unhappy and while I tried to control the variables on Saturday, the damage was done.
I want to be clear: I don't regret the time with my family and friends. I'm not saying that was the wrong choice, and I'd very likely do much of it again.
It was a performance cost I underestimated though, and I paid for it on the run.
What went wrong wasn't my physical preparation. It was the system around my physical preparation, specifically the part of that system that handles preparation, environmental and logistical variables that affect performance.


Performance is fragile in ways that are hard to account for from the outside.

The Football World Cup is on as I write this. As I watch the teams play I think about how they operate. For sure they are traveling together, staying in the same hotel, eating the same food, practicing at the same times, following the same schedules. On the surface that may look like logistics. But at a performance level it's a step to remove potential variables that could negatively impact performance.

If performance were purely a function of skill and fitness, none of those details would matter. But they do matter, because the expression of physical capacity is affected by emotional, social, environmental, cognitive, and logistical factors, often all at once.
The higher the level, the tighter those margins get.
Age group triathletes are not traveling with a performance team. We're making those decisions ourselves. Which means we have to be honest, maybe more honest than we often are, about the cost of the choices we make in the days before and when we race.


What this means for you

I'm not writing this to be dramatic about a “bad” race (it wasn’t that bad!). I'm writing it because I think it illustrates something worth understanding as an athlete working toward racing better.

You can have excellent fitness and still not perform. You can train harder than you ever have and still leave the race feeling like you didn't access what you'd built. And when that happens, the instinct is often to look at the training!
You'll ask: "Was I fit enough?". "Did I peak at the right time?". "Should I have run / swum / biked more?".

Sometimes the answer is yes, you should have done things differently in training.

But often the answer is no!
Sometimes the thing that fails you isn't fitness. It's the systems around the fitness and your racing.
That system includes your technical execution under fatigue. It includes your familiarity with the race environment. It includes the decisions you make in the days before you race; when you travel, what you eat, how you sleep, what you drink, how much cognitive and emotional load you're carrying into race week and the start line.

I think we often fail to express physical potential not because the potential wasn't there, but because the demands of the performance exceeded the demands we'd been prepared for, not physically, but in every other dimension.

For me in Durban, the fitness was there. The preparation wasn't complete. I left a door open, the wrong thing walked through it, and my race paid the price.

None of this is to say that you need to lock yourself in a room for a week before every race and eat nothing but white rice.

There is more to life and this sport is part of a bigger picture.
But having awareness is important. Understanding why things go wrong is the first step toward making better choices next time.

I'll race Durban again. And when I do, I'll be just as social, and a lot more deliberate about the tap water.

~ Rory