On Monday 14th November, three-time WTCS medallist Beth Potter gave a talk at the Royal Society as part of the conference “Innovation in sport: accelerating breakthroughs in engineering, optimisation and performance“.
As background, the Royal Society is the independent scientific academy of the UK.
Potter starts her talk by covering her switch from athletics to triathlon in January 2017. She then discusses the overarching goal of racing, namely to be able to win all type of races. To this end, she includes analysis of different events with different race profiles, including her medal-winning performances at WTCS Hamburg and WTCS Bermuda. (Disclosure: TriStats’ race development graphs were used to illustrate Potter’s points).
Given the varying performance challenges in triathlon, Potter moves on to survey some of the different training zones that most elite triathletes utilise. The two primary zones she includes are the V02 zone (or slightly above race pace) and the threshold zone (or around race pace).
After this, Potter discusses the limitations of the basic race model and presents questions that would bring more specificity to data collection for elite triathletes. Her talk contains such questions for each of the swim, bike and run and raises some interesting points.
Ultimately, Potter presents four challenges for data analysis in triathlon:
- Obtaining accurate data across multiple sources (in races)
- Linking the contexts from different data sources
- Ease of access to data
- Interpreting data and actioning it
Potter’s talk is well worth checking out to anyone interested in the challenges of data collection and data analysis in triathlon. On a more fundamental level, anyone keen to see how a WTCS medallist thinks about the sport and the demands of training will have plenty to take away from Potter’s views.
You can find the relevant video on the Royal Society page here. Potter’s presentation runs from the 1:00:00 mark until the 1:25:55 mark.
