Mistakes I made in my first triathlon season
Looking back, my first triathlon season was expensive, exhausting, and educational, in roughly that order. I got a lot wrong. Some of it was the standard beginner stuff that everyone laughs about later, and some of it quietly cost me months of progress before I figured out what was happening.
I’m writing the list down partly because newer triathletes keep asking me variations of “what should I know before my first season,” and partly because writing it down stops me from repeating it. These are the six that mattered, with what I’d do instead.
1. I bought gear before I knew what mattered
Before my first race I owned more triathlon equipment than triathlon experience. Race wheels were discussed, seriously, by a man who had never done a flying mount. I bought an aero helmet before I could comfortably ride in the drops. I had a gadget for measuring things I didn’t yet understand.
The money still stings, but the deeper problem was that I had no idea which of my limiters were equipment problems and which were me problems, and in a first season, they are nearly all me problems. An aero helmet saves you seconds. Learning to pace a bike leg properly saves you minutes, and it’s free.
What I’d do instead: race the whole first season on borrowed, basic, or existing gear, then spend money in the off-season, once a few races have shown you where you actually lose time. The gear conversation is easier when it answers a question you genuinely have.
2. I trained my strength and ignored my weakness
I came to triathlon from running. So naturally, I spent my first season running.
Run training felt good. I was competent at it, the numbers improved predictably, and every session ended with the warm glow of having been good at something. Swimming, meanwhile, made me feel like furniture thrown into a lake. So I did the minimum, told myself the bike and run would make up for it, and spent every race watching the field swim away from me before spending an hour clawing back positions I shouldn’t have given up.
A weak discipline doesn’t just cost you its own leg of the race. A bad swim puts you in dirty water, ramps your heart rate into the red, and hands you a panic you carry onto the bike.
What I’d do instead: invert the time allocation. The discipline that embarrasses you gets the most attention, especially in winter when nobody’s watching. Improvement comes fastest where you’re worst, which is irritating but very convenient if you can get your ego to cooperate.
3. I didn’t practice transitions until race morning
My first ever transition rehearsal happened in an actual race. I laid out my gear the way I’d seen in photos, and then spent T1 fighting my wetsuit like it owed me money while people who looked far less fit trotted past me holding their bikes.
Transitions are the only part of triathlon where free speed exists in meaningful quantities, and they’re the only part most beginners never practice once. The skills involved are not athletic. Taking off a wetsuit, racking a bike, getting shoes on with wet feet. Any of it can be rehearsed in a driveway on a Tuesday.
What I’d do instead: ten minutes of transition practice a week for the month before a race. That’s the entire investment. I eventually wrote up everything that actually works in triathlon transitions: save minutes without buying anything, and the title is the point. It’s the cheapest speed in the sport.
4. I only ever swam in a pool
Every swim of my first season happened in a 25-meter pool. Clear water, a line on the bottom, a wall every few seconds, push-offs included free of charge. Then I showed up to races and discovered open water is a different sport: no line, no walls, water the color of strong tea, and forty strangers’ elbows.
My first open-water race start scared me badly enough that my stroke fell apart for several hundred meters. Nothing about my fitness had changed between the pool and the lake. Everything about the environment had, and I had given my brain zero rehearsals.
What I’d do instead: get into open water at least three or four times before racing in it, with company and somewhere supervised. Practice sighting and swimming straight without a line, and rehearse the first couple of minutes at race effort, because the start is where the chaos lives. The full beginner’s version is in open water swimming for pool swimmers. The pool builds your engine. It cannot build your nerve.
5. I raced every weekend I could
Somewhere mid-season I discovered that race entries are a renewable resource and self-restraint is not. There was a stretch where I raced something, a tri, a 10K, an aquathlon someone talked me into, nearly every weekend for two months.
Each race demands a taper, an effort, and a recovery, even when you pretend otherwise. Stack them weekly and you stop doing any actual training. You’re permanently either resting for a race or recovering from one, and your fitness flatlines while your enthusiasm quietly drains out the bottom. By late season I was slower than mid-season and, worse, I didn’t care. Standing in a lake at 7am had lost its charm entirely.
What I’d do instead: pick two or three races that matter, space them out, and let everything else be training. A small number of races you’ve genuinely prepared for beats a calendar full of mediocre efforts, and the burnout I hit in September was the most predictable thing about my whole season.
6. I treated easy days as optional
Of everything on this list, this one cost the most fitness.
My logic was painfully simple: hard workouts make you fit, so the more days that are hard, the fitter you get. Easy runs got nudged faster because the pace on the watch embarrassed me. Recovery spins became tempo rides because I felt good for the first ten minutes. Every session drifted toward the same gray middle effort, hard enough to wear me down, too easy to sharpen anything.
The result was a season of permanent low-grade fatigue. My hard days weren’t actually hard because I never arrived at them fresh, which meant the workouts that were supposed to drive adaptation were mediocre too. I was training more than people who beat me, and the gap kept growing.
Easy days are what make hard days possible. Once I started keeping easy days genuinely easy, embarrassing pace and all, the hard sessions improved within weeks. If you don’t know where your easy effort actually sits, heart rate zones are the simplest honest answer, because the watch doesn’t care about your pride.
The pattern, in case it’s useful
Reading these back, five of the six mistakes have the same root: I did what was comfortable and called it training. Buying gear was more comfortable than confronting weaknesses, and running was more comfortable than swimming. Racing every weekend was more comfortable than the patient, boring weeks in between. None of it required anyone to teach me a lesson, just a willingness to notice that the uncomfortable option kept being the one that worked.
The gear got sold, eventually, at the prices you’d expect. The lessons I still use every season.
