Practice, practice

First up, apologies folks, no blog yesterday as it turns out. If I am honest it just completely slipped my mind. All I can say in my defence is that I had a busy day yesterday, we were out last night and it wasn't until we got home that I remembered that I hadn't done a blog. By that stage it was about 11:00pm and that ship had sailed. Anyway, sorry again. Won't happen again. Probably.

Anyway, moving on.

An interesting thing happened today which has prompted some thinking on my behalf.

Today was the State and National Duathlon Championships. For that last few years the National Duathlon Championships have been held in Perth and so it was again this year. The race also happens to be the official opening of our local Triathlon series. Yes I know the opening race of the triathlon season is not actually a triathlon, but there you go. I don't make the race calendar.

Given it is the first race of the season a lot of athletes from Front Runner were there competing, many of them doing rather well for themselves. However, for one member of the Front Runner team their day didn't so much go to plan. They were having a pretty good day, coming off the bike into T2 in a pretty good position, however, when they got to their allocated rack they found to their surprise another bike int their spot and their shoes missing!!!!!

Of course, it is against the rules to run without shoes and so this athlete didn't have much choice but to DNF. Very frustrating end to what should have been a great day. Of course the person who accidentally took the wrong shoes ended up with a DQ (for interfering with another competitors equipment) and so the silly mistake ended up costing two races. A bit of a waste really.

Off the back of this incident, many of people in the Front Runner Team have asked, how do you take somebody else's shoes by mistake? Particularly given that the correct shoes were apparently a completely different brand and colour. Well I can't speak for this particular individual, but I do know that when somebody does something silly in a race it is usually because for some reason they have deviated from routine.

When we race our minds are not usually at their clearest. In fact as we get more and more fatigued it is fair to say that our decision making becomes impaired, our racing starts relying on instinct and learned patterns. That is usually fine, unless we deviate from those learned patterns. If that happens we then force our mind into making decisions mid race and very often it does a poor job at it.

This is why it is so important that we practice things like transition and our race plan. It is also why it is important to have thought through different racing scenarios (both good and bad) before race day. By thinking ahead and practicing we increase the chance that our instincts and our learned behaviours will be able to cope with the unexpected if it occurs on race day. If something unplanned comes our way, but we have thought about it and practiced for it, then we are able to over come without being flustered. However, if the unexpected occurs when we are not ready for it then there is a chance that our tired brain will get overwhelmed and then panic. If that occurs then silly decisions, such as running off in somebody else's shoes, are likely to occur.

As with everything, practice makes perfect.