Its been a little over a week now since the Chinook Half. A few of you close to me will know that it wasn’t really my day and I wasn’t too happy with my result. I’ve had some time to think about it now and have broken down a few of the things that went wrong. I figure its good to share a few of these items so none of you make the same mistakes as me.
- First and foremost, I wasn’t race ready for the water. Chinook was my first open water swim of the season, and the first time I’d put my wetsuit on since IMC last year. My swim split was still okay, especially by my marginal standards, but not great.
- Secondly, I wasn’t race ready for the bike. Its not that my bike fitness was lacking, on the contrary, over the past few months I’ve been quite strong on the bike, and I was at Chinook as well. But I hadn’t been taking a whole lot of calories in training on the bike so between that and last year when I took to many calories too late in the bike, I ended up taking on too few calories on the bike leg at Chinook. I wasn’t taking on as many calories as I needed, and of the calories I was taking in, it wasn’t digesting. The first sign that something was amiss was when I had a bit of a headache late on the ride… Some foreshadowing here.
- In contrast to the first two, I was actually very well prepared for the run. I’d been having some knee issues the week before the race, but it was all cleared up before the race. When I got off the bike I was comfortably running between 4:30/km and 4:45/km. But after the first run lap, the sun came out and as it started to warm up, my nutritional issues on the bike started to haunt me and I began to shut off. I knew I was cooked when near the end of the first lap I was feeling chilly and light headed. My options at that point were to manage whatever energy I had left and walk-run the remainder, keep pushing knowing that I could bonk hard, or DNF. I chose the first of those options and managed to run a 2:01 half marathon, the slowest I’ve ever finished a run of that distance.
In the end my finish time was about 15 minutes slower than last year, and about 30 minutes off my target, and the entirety of that 30 minutes came in the last 10km of the run. A tough pill to swallow, and I could hear from some of the comments at one of the checkpoints that I wasn’t looking good.
After the NBA finals, I watched Mark Cuban rip Skip Bayless a new one on ESPN. Cuban tore into Bayless for saying the Thunder didn’t want the championship was much as the Heat and that Kevin Durant didn’t play hard enough. He said “Thats ridiculous, when you are at the close out game, nobody wants it more. Its just a question of who executes better”.
Awesome, post Raf! when it doesn’t go your way, most important thing is to take something forward so you are better next time out. Looking forward to hearing about your next race which I have no doubt that you will KILL.