My Competitiveness: An evaluation of the attribute and not the virtue

OK--most folks know me as a competitive dude. We could debate that, but this is not about that virtue. what this is about is how competitive I am when I race triathlons. This is an attribute that can be used to describe me.

To do this I went to the data and evaluated all of my short course/non-national events and compared myself to the person that won my AG in each race or, in those happy times, the guy that was second to me. This turned out to be 73 of the 100 races that I have done so far. I tracked on average how much I was ahead or behind the #1 or #2 guy (as the case may be) for each race I did between 2001-2010 (ten years). I also broke this down by individual discipline splits (swim, bike, run). Since each race varies in discipline and aggregate distance, I then created a synthethic race of 0.25 mile swim/11 mile bike/3.1 mile run as a standard sprint race to compare myself against my closest competitor over time and by discipline.

I believe this is a very powerful indicator of how competitive I am versus my top competitor in my AG in my most typical race--a local sprint. I think that looking at the trends in this data tells me a great deal about how competitive I am in these races and most importantly, what I need to work on.

Enough said. Let's look at the data (click on the charts to see them more clearly; 1=2001 and 10=2010):



This is a graph of my competiveness in the swim. As you can see, my swim has been a competitive liability for most of my triathlon career. In 2001 I lost over 4 minutes in a 0.25 mile swim. However, I have steadily improved my swim competitiveness and for the first time in 2010, my swim was an actual competiive asset. this gives me great confidence in what I'm doing with my swim and consequently my 2011 training plan is to do more of the same.

Here is the graph for my bike leg:



After my poor first year, I've always enjoyed a significant advantage on the bike. This peaked in 2007 when I worked with Pete Reid and was still pretty strong in 2008 and 2009--over 2 minutes against my main competitor. However, the graph clearly shows my fall off in 2010. This is the "minute" that I feel that I have lost against my competition and is the main reason I am pursuing "Project FTP"

The run looks like this:



As you can see, my run is not nearly a pretty a picture. It has always been a real liability for me. However, in 2007-2009 I was able to neutralize most of this disadvantage. However, in 2010 with my hip issues, I had a major set-back competitively. This is my most urgent competive issue for 2011. This will be a major focus on my training efforts on the run, and the bike.

Overall--this is what it looks like:



You can clearly see how I've been able to improve my competitiveness over the years--this frankly is a principal design objective of my training and racing plans. However, the trends over the last two years are not positive (of course these could be in-part related to me getting up there in the 50-54 YO AG). I intend to change this in 2011--I'll improve my bike by a minute or so and hopefully my run as well....

that's the plan