Unfortunately I learnt the hard lesson that "bad" races and disappointment are part of the gig of being a professional athlete, or any athlete for that matter. Coming into the race I was feeling fast in training and was fairly confident that I had a shot at winning the race, and almost certainly a top 3 finish.
I had a really good swim, coming out with a gap on the rest of the field coming into T1. I extended my lead through the bike and headed into T2 confident that I could bring it home in the run. Then things started to go pear shaped. In my rush to have a quick transition I didn't hook my seat over the rack properly and my bike fell over. I put my shoes on then had to pull my bike back off the ground from underneath the next bike and re-rack it. That lost me 5-10 seconds, not much, but valuable time in such a short fast race. I still had a lead of 12 seconds at the start of the run but I struggled to find my rhythm and was soon caught by Brittany Dutton who was flying on the run. About 500m into the run I started to feel a twinge which quickly developed into a full blown stitch. I was forced to slow right down to a shuffle, struggling to breathe. From then my race was reduced to a 3.5km shuffle to get myself to the finish line. It was frustrating watching the other girls cream past me, unable to run properly. I crossed the line in 5th place, 3 mins behind the leader and feeling rather despondent after being in the lead less than 20 minutes ago.
My immediate reaction was to feel upset that I'd had a "bad" race, but on reflection, it wasn't a bad race, it was a good race until the run. Just because I had finished lower down the rankings than I would have liked I felt embarrassed and worried about what others would think about my performance/abilities. Everybody has off days though, whether because you're fatigued, got pummelled in the swim, stuffed up your nutrition or got your race tactics wrong. You just have to accept that your race isn't going to go perfectly all the time; in fact, it is NEVER going to go perfectly. In the end what matters more is what you take out of the race - learn from what went wrong (and what went right!), and accept that sometimes the situation is out of your hands.
In this case I learnt that drinking too much Gatorade on the bike leads to a very uncomfortable run. In hindsight I never used to drink Gatorade during a sprint distance race. It wasn't until I started racing Olympic distance that I used Gatorade. A single bottle of water would have sufficed for the 15km cycle. It just emphasises the importance of the small details such as nutrition, and transitions!!!
Gillian
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