Subject: RE: Realistic goal for sprint triathlon As others said, don't set arbitrary goals. However, I'm a firm believer that, with a little testing, you can figure out realistic time goals, even when it's your first race. An easy (although speculative ) way to figure out a good goal is to time yourself in each of the three components of the event separately. How fast can you swim a half-mile (or 500 meters, or whatever the swim portion will be )? How fast can you bike 12 miles on a course of similar terrain? How fast can you run a stand-alone 5k?
My first race back in 2005 was a 500-m swim, 11-mile bike, 5k run. I swam a 500 in the pool at the effort I intended to do in the race and then added about 2 minutes to that to compensate for the fact that I wouldn't have the benefit of pushing off walls in the real race. My race was in Orlando, so I found a relatively flat 12-mile loop and timed myself in that, too. I added about 3 minutes to that time just to be conservative. Did the same thing for the run. Figured in about 8 minutes for total T1 and T2 times and then added them all up to get my goal time. I came in about 4 minutes faster than my goal time, despite having a subpar run.
Best advice I ever got was to give myself a range to meet based upon my goal time as the middle. If I got in that range, I'd be happy, if I got the goal time, I'd be ecstatic, and if I beat it, I would be REALLY ecstatic.
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