Let’s face it, you are not going to win every race you enter. But when you finish in any other place besides first you’re still going to ask yourself the same question every athlete asks themselves at some point: what could I have done differently to place even just a spot higher? First, you will look at your swim split and wonder if you had done just one more set of 100’s you may have knocked off a few seconds. Then you will look at your bike and wonder about that one long ride you missed two months ago. Finally, you’re going to see your run time and remember how you took it easy on your last interval workout. But many overlook two other critical times – T1 and T2.

Look at the results from any local race and you are going to see a huge disparity between the times of the top three and bottom three athletes in transition. Yet if you think about it, everyone should really be able to have fast transition times. After all, athletic abilities do not play a significant factor in transition. The differentiator is practice and familiarity. The top athletes have spent time honing this skill, while many others simply show up at a race and assume it doesn’t matter.

Of course you can start practicing transition without a rack. But if you want to practice as close to race conditions as possible then having a rack is a must. We first looked at building our own rack and came across the offering from MyTriRack while searching for a how-to-guide. Once we saw the price we quickly realized that this was the way to go. For $49.99 you get a rack capable of letting you and 3 of your closest friends find speed where you never looked for it before.

MyTriRack actually sent us their $79.99 version that adds locking rings to their standard model. The goal of the locking rings is to allow you to do bricks that take you out of sight of your equipment. You can lock the rack and your equipment to any permanent standing structure, or as MyTriRack demonstrates, even to the door handle of your car. To be honest, while the locking rings do work, we were never thrilled with leaving our bikes locked up with a piece of cable that a dead bolt cutter can make extremely short work of. However for those looking for something to add a bit of additional security while doing bricks, the locking rings are the way to go.

Setting up the rack is a breeze and can be done in just a few minutes. MyTriRack.com has the video below available to help demonstrate setting up the MyTriRack.

The team can get our rack setup in just a few minutes. When our workout is done for the day, cleanup is just as easy. How many times have you found that once you build something, you can never take it apart and put it back together the same way the manufacturer did? Not so with MyTriRack. We can repack it to the “packed” configuration that we see on MyTriRack’s site with ease.

55 seconds separated ninth and tenth place at a recent event in Miami. The difference between those two athletes in transition – 1:42. A minute is an eternity in a sprint distance event, and a time savings that could take months of practice on the bike or run to attain. But transition practice can very well help you find that lost minute in just a few sessions. With that said, at just $49.99 the MyTriRack represents an incredible value and something every triathlete should have in their garage.