Blue - I understand what you are saying. I've belonged to tri clubs before and it's always tough when you go out with the group. Like V said, there is always someone faster. I liked training with my tri group and in the beginning I was one of the faster ones, I had been in the sport for longer and had more base. I'm not naturally fast so it wasn't long before a lot of the juniors started to kick my butt. Eventually, I had to stop training with the club, they were too fast and I was pushig myself so hard that I wouldn't recover well. This led to poor race results and even a bad spell of pneumonia.

I had to really take a step back and listen to my body. Guess what, by slowing down and doing my workouts as planned, not only am I having more fun, but I'm also improving faster. I recover better and I can see myself getting stronger weekly.

Triathlon is a tough sport. It's a great sport. It's also a sport that attracts people that are uber-competitive. It's really easy to get caught up in it all. My advice is to try to take a step back and reassess how and with who you want to spend your training time. You might still want to train with the group once per week, call it your hard workout. Then workout by yourself the rest of the week.

Since I just moved, I have no training buddies and I workout by myself almost all the time. I kinda like it.