Realistic Season to Season Improvement

I'll start by qualifying what follows:
Firstly, I'm going to assume that the triathlete in the illustration that follows is in the 30-45 age group i.e. your absolute maximal potential capacity is declining because of your age.
Secondly, I'm going to assume that this theoretical triathlete is starting from a base of reasonable activity e.g. does some running/jogging; maybe mountain bikes a little and can swim, although not necessarily a regular swimmer.
Finally, I'm going to assume that the athlete can follow a structured training program such that they can average around 10-12 hours per week from their second year of training onward.

So here goes ....

In the first year, we'll assume that the athlete targets an Olympic distance race four months or so in the future and gets to the point when they're confident they can finish .... the question is how fast!
Typically, this reasonably well prepared athlete will finish in 3:00 hrs. Maybe a little more if a couple of things go wrong, maybe a little less if they're starting from a competitive base in one of the three disciplines.

If the triathlon bug bites, and triathlon becomes their sporting focus, I'd normally expect to see round about a 15% improvement in their second season. The 3:00 hour race of the previous year is down to around 2:33 or so. To do this, I would expect them to have done 400-500 hours of triathlon specific training.

After this second year, improvement becomes increasingly hard to come by and, in my experience, (and in that of the majority of people that I've coached) your percentage improvement tends to be around half of what it was the previous year.

In other words, in the third year, I would expect the committed athlete to improve 7.5%, so that the Olympic distance time is down to 2:21. In the fourth year, I'd be looking for a 3.75% improvement (time down to 2:16) and so on i.e. 5th year 1.9% (2:13), 6th year 1% (2:12) and 7th year (2:11)

After this time (and quite a lot of literature supports this as well) I wouldn't expect further improvement: the athlete is probably close to their personal maximum.

OK .... so what about athletes that are significantly better or worse than this?

I'll talk about that in the next post ...