Triathlon is a great sport!
The combination of three basic endurance sports offers variety in the daily training, the benefits of crosstraining and numerous ways of improving in case of performance plateaus - to name a few advantages.
Trying to reach your full potential in each of the disciplines is one of the major pitfalls, especially for young over achievers, as each of these time consuming sports are fully capable of sending athletes into the debilitating dark zones of injury and overtraining.
One of the main goals for a coach in endurance sports is to help the athletes avoiding injuries and overtraining by structuring a program that´s motivating, have clear goals and allows for gradual improvements.
A lot of self coached athletes have ambitious goals and channels their strong motivation into very ambitious training plans - often inspired by the ubiquitous training dairies from pro/fellow athletes on the internet.
More often than not these athletes are overreaching and inevitably  their training and progress are halted along the way, by overuse injuries.

"The mind is stronger than the flesh" and we all know how easy it is to plan out some really ambitious, world class, potential revealing training regimes, but you gotta be ready to walk the talk.

A well structured program incorporates planned recovery days/weeks/months and even years!
It learns the athlete to skip planned workouts when not feeling ready and not trying to press in the missed training afterwards, to satisfy their mind, training dairy or coach - or a obsession of not breaking a yearlong running streak.
Sometimes the body will insist on having the neglected recovery breaks, unfortunately in the shape of overuse fatigue, injuries or the dreaded long term overtraining syndrom, that sidelines athletes for months, years or for good...
In my own modest world of excelling in mastering PowerCranks, I had a an intention of riding every day for a full month.
Experiencing daily improvements, I was highly motivated in executing this plan - regardless of the overall plan of training for triathlon.
Yesterday I had a birthmark removed by the doctor and was told to take it easy for two days and try not to break a sweat...
I can´t ride my PowerCranks easy, not to mention the massive sweating after less than five minutes - so no PowerCranking for a few days - I´ll report on the hopefully good effects on this forced break.