Antwerp 70.3 - 2010

For me, this was to be the highlight of my season with pretty much all of my preparation to date being focused on just doing well over this distance at this event. For the four weeks leading up to this race, I had been spending every Saturday just doing lap after lap of Regent's Park on the TT bike followed by a run. These were going well too, I had pretty much worked out (probably for the first time) how easy I need to take it on the bike to give myself a fighting chance on the run.

So, after all of this, to suddenly find that you have a bit of a sore throat on the Tuesday and by the time you arrive in Antwerp, this has developed in to a full blown cold, one can feel slightly disappointed and annoyed for putting all your eggs in one basket.

Still, I was not so unwell that not starting was on the agenda so I headed down to T1 on race day to get things ready. At the start of the swim though, and in doing the first bit of high intensity stuff since getting ill, I realised straight away that I was not good. I was coughing in the water, so decided to just find some feet and try and sit on them, the thinking was, I was only going to lose about 1-2 minutes in the swim so better to just get through it with the maximum amount of help.

Out on the bike though and things felt relatively good. I was sticking to my plan quite well in terms of drinking frequently and making sure that I was never pushing that hard etc. By the time I had got to about 50k, I had worked my way quite far up the field whilst still feeling quite good. It was when I looked at the HR though that I got worried. At breakfast it had been higher than normal by about 10-15 beats and on the bike, for the perceived effort, it was just as high. Not good I thought, but at the time I figured the only way I had a chance of qualifying was to keep going to the plan and see how long I could get away with it.

Towards the end of the bike, I had my disheartening 70.3 moment. I was caught by one chap and then looked behind to see that he was simply spearheading a group of about 15-20 riders who were pretty much riding in a peleton. Kind of makes you wonder why you bother. Anyway, not wanting to simply brake all the way to, and then off, the back, I road with these guys to the finish...albeit, I tried to stay away from them as much as possible by riding in the middle of the road etc.

T2 went okay and then out on the run things felt a bit worse than I was hoping. I felt hot but I was managing to stick with the 4min/km that I was hoping to stick to for the run. This all seemed to be okay for about the first 5k, but then all of a sudden, I felt really hot and thought I was going to feint in the middle of the road. I stopped for a quick walk, but at that point, I knew it was all over. I felt rubbish and the illness had finally got the better of me. So, I started to adopt a run walk strategy to wait for Paula to catch me who was one lap behind. We eventually ran one lap together with P almost dropping me on a number of occasions, I was perhaps more of a hindrance than anything else - still, I blocked the wind when I could etc.



I eventually finished in 4:33 which including a 1:50 half marathon...I had been working towards a 1:24.

So, no Florida for me this year.....