Four Minutes You Can Have for Free.

He finished eleven seconds off a podium. In T1 he had spent two minutes and ten seconds, most of it sitting on the grass, putting socks onto wet feet with the concentration of a man defusing something.

He had trained for eleven months. He had done everything asked of him and more. And he gave away more time standing still than he lost anywhere else on the course.

Transition is the only part of a triathlon where you can get faster this weekend without getting fitter.

Why Nobody Trains It

Because it is not exercise, and because it feels faintly silly. Running around a car park barefoot with a bike, on your own, in daylight, where neighbours can see you.

So people rehearse the swim, the bike and the run, and then improvise the two parts that join them, on the one day it matters, while their heart rate is at 170 and their hands do not work properly.

That last bit is the thing people underestimate. After a hard swim in cold water you have significantly reduced fine motor control. Fingers are clumsy. Buckles become genuinely difficult. Any task that needs dexterity will take three times longer than it does on your kitchen floor, and you will not have anticipated it, because you have never practised it in that state.

Set Up in the Order You Will Use It

Lay everything out in the sequence you will touch it, left to right, and nothing else on the towel. Not a spare of anything. Not a jacket in case. Every additional object is a decision, and decisions at 170 beats per minute are slow and often wrong.

For T1: glasses, helmet, shoes. Helmet goes on and is buckled before you touch the bike, always, because in most races touching the bike before the helmet is fastened is a disqualification and because it removes a decision.

For T2: shoes, race belt, hat. That is it.

And know where your bike is. Count the racks from the entrance, not from your bike, because from the entrance is the direction you will be arriving in, and a transition area looks completely different when it is empty at seven in the morning and full at nine.

The Small Things That Actually Save Time

Elastic laces. Nothing else on this list comes close. Tying laces with cold wet fingers costs thirty to sixty seconds and a certain amount of dignity.

No socks, if your feet can take it. Practise it. If they cannot, put socks on and accept the fifteen seconds, because a blister at kilometre four costs more.

Wetsuit off to the waist while you are running from the water. Not standing at your rack. The suit comes down over the hips as you move, and the arms come out as you run. This alone is twenty seconds.

A race belt rather than pinning your number to a top. Pinning is a job for the night before, and a belt spins round for the run in one movement.

And spin easy for the last five minutes of the bike. Higher cadence, lower force, so your legs arrive at T2 having already started to change gear.

How I Make Athletes Practise It

Once a fortnight in the build phase, and it takes ten minutes.

Set your kit out on the driveway as you would in transition. Run 400 metres hard, so your heart rate is genuinely elevated and your hands are less useful than usual. Then do the full T1 sequence, get on the bike, ride 200 metres, come back, do T2, run 400 metres.

Do it four times. Time each one. You will be faster by the third repetition and the improvement will not go away.

That is forty minutes of work across a season for two to four minutes on race day. There is no session in the sport with a better return, and no session that athletes skip more reliably.

The Part That Is Not About Time

Transition is also where races come apart mentally.

It is loud, it is disorientating, you have just come out of cold water, and you are surrounded by people moving fast. If you have not rehearsed it, your nervous system reads all of that as threat and your thinking narrows exactly when you need to remember which rack is yours.

A rehearsed transition is a rehearsed calm. You are running a sequence you have run twenty times, which means the noise stays outside. That is worth more than the seconds.

The Bottom Line

Lay your kit out in the order you will use it and put nothing else there. Elastic laces. Wetsuit off while moving. Helmet before bike. Spin the last five minutes.

Then practise it, warm, with your heart rate up, four times, once a fortnight. It is the cheapest time in triathlon and almost everybody leaves it on the grass.