Race Day Eve

Race Day tomorrow. Not for me of course, but about 20 or so members of the Front Runner tri team will be lining up for the WA Sprint Triathlon Championships. It should be an exciting day.

Hopefully the day is able to go to plan for everyone, at the moment the forecast for tomorrow is looking rather ominous, to the point that the swim could well be called off. Of course the forecast could have it entire wrong and the morning ends up being blue skies and light winds, but at the moment they are forecasting gale forced onshore winds. If that happens then it may well be too dangerous to do the swim leg. I guess we will just have to wait and see what the morning brings. Hopefully it brings some clear weather.

Whether the swim is on or not, the race will definitely still be happening and so with that in mind I spent a bit of time discussing race day with a number of my athletes today. Each of them had different concerns, but a common theme that came up was nerves.

Now I am a bit of an expert on nerves since I suffer from them pretty badly, however, I am not sure I can claim to be an expert on controlling nerves. However, I do have a few approaches that have helped me minimise my nerves over the years.

The main strategy I used for controlling my nerves was planning. Often nerves are made worse by the unknown. What if I forget something? What if this happens, or that happens? What if I don't race well?

In my experience it is almost impossible to get rid of nerves, but at the same time making sure you have a plan can help reduce them a bit. If you are getting anxious about forgetting something on race morning then put together a packing list, put together two if you think that will help. When it comes to packing don't leave it all for race morning but do as much preparation as possible the day before so that you can go to bed knowing that you are good to go.

Plan through your race morning so that you know that you won't be late, won't run out of time, won't be rushed etc. If you have planned your morning then you have one less unknown to be anxious about.

For most people the biggest source of nerves is the race itself. With this my response is always to go back to your training. Everyone doing the race tomorrow from my squad has done the training they need. They know their race plan and they are capable of executing it. What I tell people is to come back to this knowledge and the confidence that it brings. You don't have to be anxious about the race because you know what you have to do and you know you are capable of doing it. Once you have that knowledge then the race is just about putting it together. This isn't going to get rid of nerves all together, but it should reduce the unknowns and the anxiety that comes with it.

Now, fingers crossed for some decent weather.