Wednesday 12 June 2013

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

So from starting my first season this year in the ITU world champs series races I would summarise each race with a pinch of everything as my title suggests. Auckland was clearly ugly as I got sick and couldn’t even start the race. San Diego was somewhat better in that I ticked a few boxes in the swim and bike department. Yokohama was moving in the right direction, and my most recent outing in Madrid being just ugly, full stop.
But nobody said it would be easy, and this is all part of the challenge and part of the reason we put ourselves through the daily grind, overcoming challenges, learning and moving forwards, which makes it so much sweeter when things do go right!
So although Madrid was a race I would rather forget I will give a small explanation as to why it went so ugly.
Having travelled pretty much around the world from January, which is no excuse at all as many others went extremely well still (which I have to also say, so proud to be British after Non, Jodie and Jonny stunning performances and also my team mate Annie Haug on 2nd!), I returned home to the UK and had to contend with moving to a new home in Hereford, alongside my husband leaving for a tour of Afghanistan.
Training went ok really, nothing special but nothing amazing. However I think the smaller stresses of outside my triathlon life took it out of me. I just felt really flat on race day, and had nothing to give. So that was that. I hate to DNF and gave myself a fair bit of grief over it afterwards, but ultimately I tried to think rationally in that I have the rest of the season to think about and digging myself in a big hole wouldn’t have helped much and would have took a fair bit of time to recover from.
So straight from Madrid I flew out to our European camp base in Morzine, France and met up with the rest of my squad. This place is truly beautiful, surrounded by mountains, a stream running outside our lodge its perfect and reminds me of when I used to come out to these type of places for the world mountain running championships.


I am in a good routine already and it’s exactly what I need now, a good solid block of training ahead of the next big races. These include the World Series in Kitzbuhl and world sprint championships in Hamburg and I can’t wait to get back in there and start putting what I have learnt this year together.
So although things have been perhaps a little rocky to start with it has certainly given me plenty opportunity to learn and grow as a professional triathlete and person that I plan to use in the rest of the series now. I have a fantastic support team around me who I cant thank enough for believing in me and helping me on my journey,
Bye for now
Katie