As triathletes, we call what we do in the water and on the land training – not exercising. There’s a good reason for that. Exercise is an end to itself, done to feel good, burn calories and for general health benefits.
Although training has the same immediate effects as exercising, it also has a long-range purpose, a means towards a desired result. It is sort of like the difference between reading and studying. The main purpose of training is to improve.
In addition to success, a less desirable by-product of training is expectation and, unfortunately, expectation’s nasty by-product is often disappointment. Of course, how you internalize that disappointment, can either produce motivation or discouragement.
But there are those times when you train, and you meet or exceed expectations. Your hard work paid off, or seemed to, and you set a personal best. “How did that just happen?” you may ask yourself. Some athletes go as far as reverse-engineering the exact ingredients of their success, so they can repeat it the next time they race.
It doesn’t always work, as two-time Ironman World Champion Scott Tinley can attest. After winning Ironman New Zealand one year, he quickly wrote down all the things he did leading up to that victory, in an attempt to bottle the formula. The secret sauce, as Tinley found out, had a “best before date” of one minute after the finish line.
But, just because it didn’t work for Tinley doesn’t mean there aren’t some key components that can increase your chances of setting a personal best the next time you hit the pool, track or Watopia.
Related: Test your way to a swim PB next season
First, let’s define what a personal best (PB) is not. Winning a race or winning your age group isn’t necessarily a personal best, since that outcome can largely be determined by the actions, or inactions, of others. You could have shown up to an event with little or no training, been the only person in your age group, and “won it.” That’s no achievement. On the non-racing front, setting a personal best for running 10 km when you run it all downhill is not a personal best 10 km, it is a personal best for running that distance downhill.
Although it is easy defining what a PB isn’t, nailing down what a PB is proves to be a lot more difficult. That first word in PB is personal – and personal can be very, very, subjective. Primarily, the milestone that you create needs to be meaningful to you. Multiple-Ironman winner Jordan Rapp is a believer that a personal best can’t be reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. He recalls his 2011 Leadman win near Las Vegas. He was the only male pro to finish and won the race over second place finisher Angela Naeth by over an hour. “It was a 223K course with crazy winds, zero shade, and temperatures of 42 C. That was the race that made me feel, ‘I’m back’ after my accident in 2010.”
Whether you are an established pro or an enthusiastic age grouper, a huge part of a personal best is the meaning you attribute to the performance.
Absolute vs Conditional PBs
In addition to the special meaning you attribute to the performance, you also need to understand the distinction between an “absolute” versus a “conditional” PB. An absolute PB represents your fastest time over a given distance. A conditional PB means your best performance after factoring in the environmental conditions (weather, geography) and your personal conditions when setting that PB. For example, finishing a half-distance race in under six hours may have not been a big deal to you when you were in your early 20s, but the same accomplishment when balancing a family, new job and household responsibilities in your 30s, or later, may be a big deal. With those caveats in mind, let’s delve into the ways that you can increase your chances of claiming another PB.
