If you are like me, you will love triathlon for many reasons, not the least of which is that is poses many organizational challenges.

I love to plan! I love to make lists and check things off my lists! I will confess that I have been known to make lists of what lists need to be made!

As a Placid Athlete, you should embrace the opportunity to overcome organizational challenges through making (and yes, following!) lists.  An organized athlete is a placid one.  Okay, yes — I know there are some of you out there who are able to “wing it” and stay completely calm at all times, but let’s face it:  most of us can benefit from being more organized.

What kinds of lists can be helpful?

1. Race gear. (This one deserves a blog post of its own.)   You need to make sure you show up to the race with everything you need.
2. Nutrition.  For proper nutrition, you need to plan your grocery shopping, meals, and snacks.
3. Training Plan/Schedule.  Bear with me here. A training plan is a sort-of to-do list.  It is a list of what workouts you will do each month, week, and day.
4. Other Shopping.  You will want to make lists of gear you will want as you get more experienced with the sport, such as aerobars, race wheels, and other specialized triathlon doodads.  Plus you will want to buy books to learn more about triathlon and fitness.

In short, there are a lot of opportunities for lists, and a lot of opportunities to learn from forgetting things. For example, I did a race recently and it was a great opportunity for list-making because it was a race with two separate transition areas, and used a system of three different gear bags provided by the race organizers. Because I couldn’t use my standard race checklist or gear bag, I had to create three separate lists, one for each bag. It all went fine until the night after the race was over, when I realized I had forgotten to retrieve one of the gear bags (which had my wetsuit in it). In other words, I had forgotten to make a post-race checklist, which was necessary in this case.  I won’t make that mistake again if I ever do another race like that where I need to remember to do something outside the norm.

Get out some paper and a pen (or your PDA) and start making those lists!