IM Melb 2015<\/a>) before. I pulled up sore after training and that pain continued right up until the race. Despite getting treatment every second day the problem remained, just sitting in the background.<\/p>\nIn that situation, what do you do? When you\u2019re pursuing a dream, but problems appear? As tempting as it is to whine and complain, all you can do is put your head down and give it your best shot, so that\u2019s what I did.<\/p>\n
The big day<\/h2>\n
On race day I lined up at the start feeling that I was as well-prepared as I could possibly be. I had a good swim; in fact it was the fastest I\u2019ve ever done at Kona – 48:57. There were about 10 athletes in the front group and then a small gap to us. There were a lot of serious contenders in my group. I was out of the water in 20th place, but whenever I\u2019m only a minute behind someone like Jan Frodeno, that\u2019s a really good swim for me. Bottom line – I couldn\u2019t have swum any harder.<\/p>\n
And that was fine, because we quickly caught the front guys on the bike. The pace at the start of the bike leg was intense, but I felt pretty comfortable. At about 40km I started moving up and then found myself leading the race, which boosted my confidence. The view from the front in a World Championship is pretty good!<\/p>\n
However, my back and hip had started hurting as soon as I got onto the bike. I thought perhaps I could \u2018ride it out\u2019, but the pain increased as we headed up the hill at Hawi. I was averaging 320w for about 30 minutes, which gives some idea of the intensity of the competition. That\u2019s going over my threshold.<\/p>\n
At the turnaround I was in 9th place but as we started the descent I lost contact with the front group. It\u2019s hard, it\u2019s windy and the pace accelerates rapidly. At that stage the rubber band always starts to stretch a bit. The group goes from 26 or 27 guys down to 10. I made the initial cut but then got dropped at about the 116km mark. At that point I struggled to push another pedal straight. I was digging as deep as I could, but with the combination of pain and loss of power I knew I was in big trouble. There was no way that I could get back into the race and I knew my hopes were dashed.<\/p>\n
Coming back into town I was feeling very disappointed. For the whole ride my NP (normalised power) was 256w. That was worse\u00a0than the last year. But it just wasn\u2019t enough and the back\/hip pain was intense.<\/p>\n
Over the line<\/h2>\n
When you\u2019re out of the competition and out of the money, it\u2019s very tempting to pull the plug and say enough is enough. But in my mind, you don\u2019t go to Kona unless you intend to finish the race. I completed the race with a good run – 2:53:14, but I felt incredibly disappointed as I finished in 19th place.<\/p>\n
What do you do when you work hard to achieve a dream but problems prevent you from succeeding? That\u2019s not just an issue for athletes – that\u2019s an issue for everyone on and off the course. Really, there are only two choices – you either give up your dream or you learn the hard lessons, change your strategy and try again. Once again, I learnt some hard lessons at the World Championships. I need to work harder on my cycling. Refine my body position. I need to focus more on strength and conditioning so that I go into the race in peak physical conditioning.<\/p>\n
And my dream? Morale and self-esteem took a bit of a beating in Hawaii this year, but the dream is still burning and it will keep motivating me to give 100%. I\u2019ll go back to Kona, stronger, wiser and more committed. I\u2019ll go back to Kona and challenge the Island once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[371],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2258"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2265,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions\/2265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}