National Championships - The art of complacency and racing like an idiot

This weekend saw my return to Wakefield for the National Triathlon Championships...the same event that saw me make a number of mistakes last year and yet somehow still manage to make the GB team...thanks last year to someone else dropping out and opening up a slot for me.

A while back I had decided that this year I was going to race this race as well as I could and actually do the course justice...especially as this is pretty much the toughest course in the triathlon calendar, with the bike section taking in some 25km of climbing and some fast descents.

At the end of the day,my race preparation was just totally rubbish...I had become slightly complacent on the back of some of my recent times and I had made the foolish assumption that qualification (a finish in the top 8 of my age group) was pretty much a given...I just could not believe that I would be that far down. During the week beforehand, I had not really got enough sleep and on Wednesday, I probably ended up doing over 5 hours of exercise in the day...never really a good thing during a week before a big race. I had also eaten way too much during the week so the combination of all this bad preparation saw me head up to Wakefield, overweight, tired and with a cold coming on thick and fast. Still, I believed that it would still be okay and that a finish in the top 8 should be a breeze.

I woke up on race day and I realised that I was still feeling tired and my blocked nose was telling me that this was not going to be too much fun. We all headed down to the lake though and set up our transition area. I did this way too quickly and just paid the price for this later on.

Still, in the end all the 30-34 got into the water for the swim.



The swim for me started off really well when I realised that I was going round the first buoy after 300m in about 3rd place...probably my best ever position in a triathlon of this standard - things were looking good. On the long straight to the second buoy though I made one of the biggest mistakes in traithlon - I allowed someone else to sight for me. I stuck with some chap for about 200m before looking around to see that I had totally gone off course and now had to make my way back to the rest of the group. Obviously, I had lost a fair few places though and hence only got out the water in a little over 24 minutes...pretty much exactly the same as last year.

I always knew that the bike leg on this course was not going to be much fun. On a flatter course, I can pretty much always assume that no one is going to come past me for the entire 40km's of cycling. However, on a course like this, being a big lad makes it a bit harder going up the hills. Alas, I was passed by someone in my age gruop pretty early on and he just seemed to ride away from me. I passed a few in my age group as we made our way round, but a few passed me as well so my age group place at the end of the bike was about 1 or 2 places down on when I came out the water (6th).



Into transition 2 and I paid the price for not spendning much time setting this up in the morning. I got in and could not, for the life of me, find my running shoes. Queue some hunting up and down the rack trying to find my shoes. In the end, I wasted a whole minute in there before I found the shoes. Two of my age group enemies went straight past me in transition so heading out on the run, I was pretty despondent...this was just not gonna be my day. I started to think about what else I can do if I don't make it to the World Champs this year.

The whole run was subsequently just filled with negative thoughts about how I had not trained hard enough, what to do if if I didn't make the squad etc. In the end, I was just glad to have finished the run. I was pretty sure that I had not made the top 8.



We hung around for a bit after the race and eventually saw the results say that I had finished 10th in my age group. My analysis during the week of all the people racing made me believe that that was it, I was not in. I had pretty much already decided that time trialling was going to be my focus..even toyed with the idea of not doing triathlons any more.

I texted a few of my mates on the way home to say that I was not in and eventually Josie rung back to say that she thought I had made it in. Two of the people above apparently had qualified somewhere else so it would seem that I have got my slot for Hamburg!!

I need to wait for comfirmation though, but as it stands, I am pretty sure that I can book my spot on the "Magic Bus" (4 of us all driving to Hamburg).

So, time now to start behaving more like a triathlete....