Jan
19
70.3 Buffalo City
Filed Under Training Adventures
Just got back from the 70.3, and it is an especially bad feeling doing a DNF in your first race on Team TBB….
Well, This is the story! Sometimes things are just not in your control, and these acts of fate unfortunately usually happen when things are going well. A week before the race I had the misfortune of having a ridiculous “accident” at the pool where I swim, which resulted ultimately in the less than smiling, first ever IM DNF!
A rather large kid was running around the pool as I was walking to the changerooms, he was not watching where he was going and came straight for me at high velocity. In the act of trying to evade the inevitable collision, I swung to the side, slipped awkwardly and hit the deck! Kid laughed, I wanted to cry – for some reason I pulled something rather painfully in my left calf. It hurt, but I never imagined that it would result in something more serious!
A trip to the physio indicated that I had somehow incurred a slight tear in a muscle situated behind the shin bone of all places??? The week before the race resulted in the yo-yo feeling of is it getting better or worse and will I be able to run? It was often ok in the morning, but by the afternoon it was swollen and throbbing. On advice, it was decided that I would not run until the race, and I could bike and swim with no serious discomfort.
The Saturday before the race was a nightmare, it felt better in the morning, and by the afternoon I was back to limping around. It was a terrible feeling, like I was going into battle with a stick and others had guns and grenades!
Not wanting to let the team down, and Alex who had come all the way to watch the race, I decided to give it a try anyway – after all, if you don’t you never know when it may turnout to be the race of a lifetime!
Sadly, it did not sway in my favour – the swim was good, but then the relentlessly hard bike course (45km of climbing and head wind) bore no sympathy for my aching calf muscle :-(. I rode as best as I could, but at the end of the bike I knew that I was causing more damage, and decided that I had to DNF and rather refocus on being right for the training camp and IM SA in April.
Having not had an injury in the last ten years (except the odd bike crash), this has been really hard to swallow and has necessitated a large chocolate consumption 
, but as they say sometimes things just happen for a reason…