So I am back in lovely grey wintery Perth, having left drizzly windy Cairns last night. It is good to be home. I have the usual post race feeling of having been beaten, ever so gently, over my entire body with a stick. I am still working through yesterday's race in my head, but all up I am happy with the result. It occurred to me that my 5th place would probably have been good enough to get me a slot at the 70.3 Worlds in Vegas again, but if you have read my race report from Vegas last year, you can probably guess that I am not all that interested. Nice to confirm that Singapore last year wasn't a fluke though.
I am not going to give a blow by blow account of the race here, for that have a read of my race report which I will post soon, rather this is more about my impressions of the weekend.
When I set out my goals for this year, my goal for Cairns was top 5. I was thinking that a podium spot would be nice, but I knew from the previous year's results that Cairns is a pretty competitive field and that while top 3 would be nice, top 5 might be more realistic. So from that point of view I am pretty happy.
My only source of disappointment is that I am pretty sure that if a few things had happened a little differently I might have been able to scrape into 4th, possibly even 3rd. I am happy with the result and the time, but I can't help but think I could have gone quicker, based on how I have been going in training recently. However, I am making sure that those sorts of ifs and but thoughts don't make me disappointed with 5th. Unfortunately the reality is that not every race goes perfectly. The things that go wrong are part of the race, rather than something to be singled out and mulled over. While it is important to learn from the things that went wrong and make sure they don't happen again, I am not planning on beating myself up over them. In the end the race achieved exactly what I was hoping it would. It showed me that my fitness is back after my son was born, it gave me a benchmark to build from for the rest of the year and it showed me that training in Perth is working.
Overall I am happyish with how I executed the race. It was a funny one going into it from a planning perspective. I have spent the last week trying to shake this cold, which I still haven't managed to completely do. When I woke up race morning still coughing, Daryl and I reset my goals. There was no point racing myself into the ground if my body wasn't going to back me up. Our plan was to head out hard in the swim, start the ride aggressively and then see how the body was responding, but that is about where the race plan stopped. Play it by ear. I really didn't know how my body was going to react, particularly once the going started to get tough heading back into the headwind on the bike. Mentally I set myself for a day of participating rather than racing. As a result, going in my focus may not have been quite where I needed it to be in order to be at the pointy end. By 30kms on the bike I was still travelling well and my body was yet to fall apart, so it was at that point that I considered the possibility of actually being competitive on the day. Given the way I was feeling leading into the race and on race morning, I can't see how else we could have approached it. But it meant that going into the race some of the details, like a race plan, were a little vague. So I guess that could have been done better.
I don't really know how much of a factor how I am feeling was during the race. As I sit here coughing up more goo I am inclined to think it must have played a part. How much though I think is probably impossible to quantify. Daryl, in his typically accurate way, told me afterwards that he thought if my cold was going to play a part it was either going to be in the last 15km of the bike or the last 7km of the run, the points where it starts to hurt. I have to say the last 7km of the run was about bang on. It didn't fall to pieces, but I was forced to slow down quite a bit. That may have been due to the cold, it may have been due to poor pacing in the early part of the run, or it may have been due to hurting myself to much on the bike. Who knows, it could be any or all of those things. I am pretty sure my cold played a part though.
The reason I say I am only happyish with how I executed the race is because of the run. In the last third of the run I really started to struggle, to the point where I was walking through aid stations for the middle 5 or 6 kms worth. This may have been partly due to my cold, but I am pretty sure it was also due to going out way to quick. I succumbed to the tempting easy speed that comes when you first get off the bike. I tried to slow down, but I didn't try hard enough. Rather than force myself to slow down more, I went with it and I am pretty sure I paid the price. I got off pretty lucky though, my run time was 1 hour 33, which I think is my best time for a half marathon in a race. It would have been a lot worse if I had truly hit the wall. But I can't help but think it may have been a lot better if I had done the pacing right. The result was okay, but the means of getting there was messy and a bit lazy. I am quite annoyed at myself for doing this bit so poorly.
The other big thing that went wrong was that I dropped my chain after about 50km on the bike. I was changing gear after the one decent climb on the bike course and rather than change gear, my chain came off and got wedged between the front chain ring and the frame. When this happens it can be quite a challenge to get it out, to the point that I was pretty sure I couldn't. I was close to giving up on it when I thought I would try just one more thing and that is what got it free. Covered in grease and with my left hand covered in blood from cuts I got from the chainrings, I was able to ride off. But getting it sorted had cost me between one and a half and two minutes. Of all the various things that went wrong on the weekend, that is the one that frustrates me the most, since it was so avoidable. This sickness and the pacing, it is hard to know what effect those things had on the final result. But the dropped chain, that is a no brainer. I would have been about 90 seconds quicker if that hadn't happened. Very annoying.
Still the bright side of all that was seeing that I can have an average race and end up with a good result. Given that the race wasn't perfect, and the conditions were toughish, I am particularly happy to have scrapped in under 4 hours 30. Plus knowing that I had a bad day and still mixed it with the top age groupers is a big confidence boost. And of course the learning experiences I have gained from having a bad race are invaluable.
All up I enjoyed the weekend. There are maybe a few things I would have done differently, like maybe hung around for the Monday, but most of the weekend worked out well. The race was very well run, it had a good relaxed vibe for a Ironman event, good friendly people, great volunteers, most of the course was quite pretty, it was challenging but not impossible etc. Would I go back, yes, I am planning on it. Although next year I might be racing for a little bit longer, say approximately twice as long.
Also I should say a big congratulations to Stef Puszka and Marcus Lisle from Daryl's squad up in Darwin. Both of them earned Kona slots in the full Ironman yesterday. I know how much work both of them have put in to get to this point. So congratulations to both of them, they have truly earned it.
No comments:
Post a Comment