As race day get closer, many triathletes are hungry for information about their race. This is particularly so, for inexperienced racers and for people racing an unfamiliar course. To satisfy their need for information, many people gravitate to social media race pages.

Don’t get me wrong, there is often some good information on these pages, but it is drowned out by posts that are at best, not useful, and posts that just spread fear.  Non value added items include:

• The endless posts asking questions about things that are detailed in the Athlete Guide.  If people would just read the Athlete Guide, there would be none of these posts.  
• Posts about how difficult the course is going to be.  Typically these posts talk about the presence of hills on the bike and on the run.  I’m sorry, if you signed up for a race like those in Chattanooga, then there are going to be hills.  They are not scary at all for anyone who has done their training.
• Then there is the weather.  It’s going to be too hot or too cold.  It’s going to be windy. There is rain in the forecast. For every other situation in life, we take the weather forecast with a grain of salt.  For races however, we all seem to know how the weather will be on race day, and no matter what… it will be bad.
• Finally there are the ‘will it be a wetsuit legal swim?’ posts.  With some of the comments in these posts, it no wonder people suffer open water swim anxiety.

I am not even mentioning posts with horror stories like snakes in the road, dogs chasing runners and roads being so rough that every will get flats.  The list goes on…

So my recommendation to athletes I know, is … stay away from social media race pages.