Whenever I've written articles or conducted workshops in triathlon—and this is my 15th year of doing that sort of thing full time—it's been my observation that people chiefly want to feel better and go faster. By feeling "better" I mean they want to feel safer and/or more comfortable during a triathlon. It's all well and good to write or speak about motivating factors, and nutrition, and history, and lifestye, but what age-group racers really want is to know how to go faster and/or to "feel better" when they're doing it.

Age-group athletes want to know how people who are better than them have managed to get better than them. They want to know the tricks of the pros. Completely understandable.

There's an irony to this. The areas in which improvement comes with great difficulty—say, lowering one's 10K time by a minute—are what appears to be worth principle focus. Or if it's equipment that's being contemplated, it's the item that's most expensive that gets moved to the top of the wish list.

What is not often the subject of focus is simply learning the easy stuff, such as how to use the equipment you've got. I've got this feeling that it has something to do with what I call the cult of convenience. This is a term I use to describe 24-hour 7-Eleven stores, automatic garage door openers, coffee makers that brew all by themselves in the morning, new cars that don't need to be tuned up for their first 100,000 miles of use, and retail stores that'll refund your money for a pair of jeans you bought there (or even somewhere else) five years and two knee-holes previously.

This affects the triathlete, I believe, in that he or she believes (subconsciously, perhaps) that bikes, wheels, wetsuits and all the other paraphernalia do not need to be serviced, and the use of which does not require instruction, education or practice. To engage in any of this would fly contrary to the cult of convenience.

I am entirely and utterly enveloped into this cult. It has given me—artificially, and without altering my genes or blood chemistry—attention deficit disorder. Why the makers of my coffee machine, or garage door opener, or new vehicle, even take the time to include an instruction manual I do not know. They are gravely mistaken if they think I intend to take the time to read the manual, unless I utterly fail in my attempt to gain an understanding of the product's functionality by first randomly pushing its levers and buttons.

The problem with triathlon is that there's an element of peer-to-peer competition involved, and if such was the case with the other purchases and endeavors in our life we'd find out that we'd have to comport ourselves differently. What if it was not simply a case of recording a TV show with our VCRs? What if we had to compete with everyone on our street, and only that person who could most quickly and seamlessly achieve a recording, commercials edited out, would advance to the TV show recording world championships in Kona? Then we'd have to kick the dirt, utter "aw shucks," and really learn the VCR we'd purchased.

It's true that I frequently harp on this subject, because I marvel at how people can be so astute at their given vocations, yet not know which end of the oil can to use on their chains—or that their chains even need to be oiled. It slays me how much information there is on this site and others on how to fit oneself to one's bike, and how incredibly ill-fit so many triathletes remain. Many in our sport will not take the time to learn the easy stuff that will save oodles of time. Yet they'll get up at 4:30 every morning to do their training.

Why am I on this old saw now? On our forum are a couple of threads that discuss transitions, and how they're effected so smoothly by the pros. How do they do this? How do they exit their wetsuits so quickly?

There are two answers to this. First, at the risk of sounding flippant, they exit their wetsuits so quickly because they must. Back in the age-group waves, we exit the water in a fog. Those next to us may be in our wave, or the wave in front of us, or the one behind us. We're part of a stream of humanity and we have no clear idea where we are in relation to those against whom we compete. There's no sense of urgency. Contrast that to a pro short course race—whether it's draft legal or not—where if you miss the "pack" you are in big trouble. There's no reality other than this: If your wetsuit doesn't come off in four seconds, you're toast.

How are they able to get their suits off? They practice. If you're Michellie Jones and you've switched to an unfamiliar two-piece wetsuit, you've taken this suit off at pool's edge 25 or 30 times—top and bottom—before you've entered your first race with it. You've got your exit time down to four seconds, five at the most, because you've got to, or you're not competitive.

Conversely, I wonder how often an age-group triathlete who's spent $300 or $400 on his or her new suit has ever practiced taking the suit off more than once or twice ever in the time he or she has owned the suit?

The cult of convenience works insidiously. We've got email, pagers, and cell phones, yet we barely know how to use them. We've got high-speed rail and car pool lanes yet we work harder and longer than ever. We know what the remedy is: work smarter. We don't seem to take that vocational lesson and apply it to our avocations. We ought to play smarter too.