your thoughts please....

I found this post this weekend. I am not sure what it means, exactly, but I thought it was interesting...he started the post by saying that he does not like hearing a triathlete say they are "slow"...and here is why...

They associate their slowness, whether it's in training or, more likely, during their races, to a lack of speed. In reality it's not a lack of speed that holds them back but rather a lack of fitness.I can tell you right now that if you think you're slow, you are wrong! You are simply unfit.Yep, the truth hurts.It's not speed that limits us. Most of us have enough pure speed in us to do at least a portion of an Ironman at world-record pace. If you can sprint for a couple hundred meters at Peter Reid's 2:35 marathon pace, it's not speed that's holding you back. It's endurance. The same goes for holding his power output on the bike or sustaining his swim pace. You can go these speeds, I assure you. The question is for how long?If it's not for long, it basically comes down to this: quite simply, you lack enough endurance to hold your God-given speed for longer periods of time.And while you may never be at Peter's level, it's important to realize that endurance is relative...and trainable. For example, managing a sixty-second lap on your local high-school 400-meter track is not considered all that fast. Nor does it take much endurance to hold that pace for that long. But holding it for four laps in a row is fast! And it means you have enough endurance (i.e., fitness) to sustain such a speedy effort.What this really means is that endurance (the ability to resist fatigue at any level of intensity) is related to the event in which you compete. Just as fitness is. This is why it's silly to argue over who's fitter: a runner or a cyclist, or a swimmer and a rower. If they're relatively fast at what they do, they're all fit. If they're fast at all these activities, they're a freak of nature.And while Craig Alexander may be a freak of nature I can pretty much guarantee that you possess enough speed that you could run beside him for a while if you were completely fresh and starting anew and he were at mile 21 in yesterday's marathon of the Hawaii Ironman. This isn't to say that Craig ain't fast. He's fast over the course of an Ironman. But that just isn't fast. It's swift over a long, long time. Craig has simply fatigued less than those around him and therefore has slowed down less. In triathlon, particularly longer-distance events, it's he (or, in the case of Chrissie Wellington, she) who slows down the least who generally wins, not the speediest athlete. This is endurance. This is stamina. This is fitness. And this is especially the case as it relates to our long-distance sport of sports. Training to go fast in triathlon is best done not by speeding up but by not slowing down. And unlike speeding up, this is easily trainable.Period.