Bedford Sprint Duathlon, 11 Apr 2021

First race of the season. Also probably the race I felt least prepared for ever – and dreaded the most!

It hadn’t started out like that. When the return of outdoor racing was announced and I signed up to the first vaguely-close duathlon I could find, I was so excited – a chance to get that race atmosphere again, test myself, and have a go at qualifying for next year’s world duathlon championships! 

But the last few weeks hadn’t gone so well. Finishing my masters course was intense, then a couple of finance exams left me drowning in memorising information and struggling to switch off and sleep. Combined with my fatal optimism around training – ‘let’s have big training weeks now I’ve finished my masters’ – I got stuck in a vicious cycle of stress, lack of recovery, and feeling bad about not doing well in my training. (The curse of the addictive ‘all green’ TrainingPeaks week…) 

Luckily coach Tim stepped in and mandated a rest day, but in the end it took me more like a week of taking the foot off the pedal and focusing on the exams to start to feel like I was recovering again. Training inevitably suffered, and I didn’t have the physical or mental energy to prepare properly for the race. I realised too late I wasn’t yet confident enough on my TT bike; the day before the race involved running around the house searching for long-neglected and well-hidden race equipment; and I hadn’t even bothered to properly calculate the time we needed to leave the house. My husband Carlos summarised it perfectly – it felt like we were ‘the opposite of athletes’!

Waking up at 5am with 0° weather outside, I was seriously questioning my decision. Bedford is notoriously cold, exposed and windy – why did I think this would be fun?? I was only motivated by the fact that my Dad and friend Emily were also racing. It would be a nice social opportunity at least.

The race started. It was actually really well-organised and covid-compliant with separate waves and time trial format, and out on the open race-track I felt I had space for myself without the usual mass-start crush of elbows. The sun was starting to peep over the horizon, and I relaxed into the run, forgetting this was a race and just appreciating the chance to run beside Carlos  – and actually keep up, for the most part! 

The course turned, and bam – suddenly the wind was right in our faces. It was so strong at times it knocked the breath out of me. I was so glad I had added a fleecy long-sleeved cycling jersey over my trisuit. Carlos impressively maintained the same pace, but I dropped back to prevent excessively escalating heart rate and potentially blowing up too soon. Nevertheless, an overall quite a decent effort. 

Onto the bike, and suddenly I was faced with twists and turns seemingly every 30 seconds! Lack of technical ability and general nervousness showed through, as I had to back off almost completely at every bend. My legs also felt tired, with the exhaustion of the previous few weeks still taking its toll.

My dad once said he ‘lost the will to live’ on the bike at his first Bedford duathlon, and I think that summarises my thoughts quite effectively. Worn down by the alteration between sprinting and easing off at every bend, I backed off the pace, but a mental battering continued as I was overtaken again and again by what seemed to be every single other person on the course. Negative thoughts started to creep in, including mentally cancelling all my other upcoming races and contemplating a retirement from triathlon altogether. It seems dramatic, but fatigue and exhaustion are powerful forces! Kudos to the race volunteers who valiantly kept on cheering and added a ray of positivity to my final lonely laps.

I eventually made it to T2, and got out on the run again. Again, not too bad a pace, and by that point I was just so motivated by the ever-nearing finish line. An excellent sprint finish from the girl behind me breathing down my neck spurred me on to the end.

One hot chocolate later, having caught up with Carlos and Emily and checked the final results, I had already reversed my premature ‘I’m-quitting-triathlon’ decision. The post-race atmosphere was starting to work its magic, and I realised that this is really why I got into triathlon in the first place: to be able to enjoy training and racing with other people. 

Even though it wasn’t the ideal race result, I very much enjoyed the race environment, and found myself even more motivated to keep training for the next one. My key takeaways:

1.     Triathlon is a lonely and empty sport without races. I think the pandemic brought out the worst in the sport, with an over-focus on individual training and performance, and a reduced richness from shared experience with fellow triathletes. At Bedford, I was so excited to congratulate Emily on her stand-out performance, finishing only 15 seconds behind our age-group winner, and my Dad on his super-impressive sub-25min 5k PB!

2.     No-one is the ‘opposite of an athlete’, because there’s no one definition of ‘athlete’. Even though this was a qualifying event for the British Triathlon age-group team, there was still such a wide variety of abilities, motivations, and backgrounds. We are all ‘athletes’ because we choose to do sport – whatever our performance may be.

3.     Choose races carefully to fit around life stress. It was not a wise decision to race in the same week as my exams – we can’t give 100% to all areas of life at the same time. My health would have benefitted if I had focused on one or the other. And as hard as it is to admit that TrainingPeaks numbers aren’t perfect, they don’t always account for underlying stress and recovery needs beyond our training sessions.

4.     Marginal seconds matter. In a qualifying event like this, where you need to finish within 115% of the age group winner, a couple of seconds might make all the difference. That could mean pushing more on the final lap of the bike; practicing transitions to be extra smooth and efficient; fully emptying the tank on the second run. This is only more true of time trial races like this, where you don’t know where you are compared to your competitors. I was astounded to find I was only 117% off the winner of my age group, despite such an on-paper ‘disaster’. Could I have found an extra 90 seconds from somewhere? We’ll never know… but probably!

Kathryn Robertson Arrebola