I run a sad, slow 40 yard dash. My clean & jerk is pathetic. And I gassed out during a 20 second round on the heavy bag last winter.

Having been a football player (and speed coach), weightlifter (and strength coach), and fighter, those performances used to be my identity but now they crush my ego.

Of course, they obviously don’t matter, because I race bikes now.

So every week I look back at my training journal and notice: I don’t know anything about breakaway tactics, my aero position is weak and inconsistent, and my power-to-weight ratio is off the charts…

The bottom of the charts.

I flag those as weaknesses. In my dreams, I’m Pauline Ferrand-Prevot or Tom Pidcock, capable of lining up at the start in any cycling discipline and having fair odds of winning.

But then I look ahead at a week of training that involves sprints into long efforts, handling drills, and dieting.

This isn’t a “priorities” situation. I don’t do sprints, drills, and meal planning because they are higher value than those other things or because I’m time-poor and think they are highest ROI. (But both are true, for the record.)

I’m an enduro racer aching for my chance to be a sprinter on the velodrome. The disciplines I actually care about need absolute power plus decision-making and bike-handling under extreme duress.

Other than the power-to-weight ratio for making long steady climbs and hard accelerations better, what I identify as my weaknesses as a cyclist aren’t actually relevant to my racing.

That means they aren’t weaknesses at all. They’re just distractions.

Put my undeniable love of donuts aside for just a moment. The one thing most likely to derail my training progress in the coming year is letting a few heavy clean & jerks sneak into my program. It’s letting a few Thursday night rounds on the heavy bag sneak into my program. The one thing likely to kill my goals for next year is getting distracted by athletic qualities that I consider valuable, yet aren’t relevant to crushing my target races.

You have to compete on your strengths and manage your weaknesses. But that has to exist in the right context.

I hate getting dropped in the hills on the occasions I join a group ride. I hate doing the O lifts with what used to be warmup weights on my heavy day at a gym full of lifters.

But I do those activities for the fun. I have to put my ego aside or accept that it’s going to get trampled.

That saves energy for addressing my real weaknesses. Because a weakness isn’t just something you’re bad at, it’s a quality that limits your performance.