IRONMAN CAIRNS 2014

Driving along the Cairns coast line window down, thick warm air blowing past, incasing my arm as it hangs out the window held up effortlessly by the the pressure of the moving air. Eyes following a bird soaring high in the air, easy to pin point out with its whiteness in stark contrast against the intensity of the blue, cloudless sky. I close my eyes and the warmth of the sun on my face is pure bliss…….. until I realise that somethings missing……. then reality hits and I am pulled back from my moment of day dream, and remember that whats missing is that its Tuesday the 10th june 2014, two days post Ironman Cairns and I am driving up to Port Douglas with Marc to enjoy what has ended up been the only day since he got here that has not been cold and raining, only thing is that like I said its two days post Ironman Cairns and whats missing is that highly sort after feeling and familiar  post race ache in the body. A mix of dehydration and plain micro muscle damage that one experiences after pushing the body to its extremes, putting everything on the line and drawing on all that passion, hard work and hours of training that has been previously banked in the build up to the race, to see how fast and how far one can go…. that indescribable sense of satisfaction, and been an ironman I would say relief of knowing how deep you had to dig… and seeing how well you pulled up on the other side….. However the only pain I had was the headache I had from the pressure in my sinuses and the thickness in my chest from the Chest and Sinus infection that was still hanging around and that had robbed me of my chance to race Ironman Cairns.

I am not going to go into huge details but the basic outline is that I arrived in Cairns Sunday 1st June one week prior to the race. I had a fantastic home stay called Lucy in the perfect location and even had her little dog Baxter to keep me company as I let my body winde  down and freshen pre race.

Things had been a bit stressful in the week leaving for Cairns but once I arrived I felt settled and by Tuesday night I found myself sitting in the Cairns promenade eating my pre race fat load dinner thinking how ironic it was that i was siting here eating a hamburger and on Sunday I would be running past this exact spot in the Marathon league of an Ironman….. I knew I would remember this moment during the race and tried to tell myself to use this to make me giggle a bit inside no matter how the race was going. I remember leaving that spot and feeling like I was finally in a really good spot I was nervous of course but excited and really felt I was living the Dream. Cairns was the first place i went and trained abroad and raced as a pro triathlete and here I was 3 years later returning to step up and race the full.

But life does have a way of throwing us some decent curve balls and things kinda went down hill from there. I woke Wednesday morning with a sore throat and feeling crap, both my coach and I tied to discard it as just something minor that can happen during pre race taper, and that is what I continued to tell myself as the week progressed, despite the fact that i felt like I was progressively getting worse. I did my best to carry on with training as planned as it wasn't much anyways this close in to race day, but the thing is I was getting progressively more shattered as the week went on not fresher…. which I knew in my gut wasn't right but ever the optimist I continued to try and trust  that when I woke up Sunday I would be better.

However by Friday I was starting to realise things weren't so good. I remember doing a 20min easy swim in my wetsuit and rolling over to do a bit of back stroke and hearing this deep rasping noise and wandering what it was only to click that actually it was me inhaling……It actually gave me a bit of a shock and a reality check that maybe my chest was worse than I thought.

Despite that onwards and up wards Saturday went ahead as planned, despite feeling progressively worse as the day went and coughing up more and more crap out of my lungs. I did my best to put up a healthy front at the race brief and it was a mission not to have a coughing fit….. not a good look to start hacking up green crap the night before an Ironman in a pro briefing …. or maybe just a good way to empty a room fast….

I was doing my best to stay light hearted about everything and just concentrate on the race ahead, but its a hard place to be in when its the eve of the event you have spent months and so many hours of hard grind working towards and you should be in a space of freshness and strength eager to unleash it all the next day, yet my body was a shadow of its self and felt like it was fading away as the day progressed. Coming home that afternoon post briefing, Pre (My Cervelo) racked and ready in anticipation and I was seroiusly struggling to get up the one flight of stairs up to our first floor hotel room.

Saturday night was a rough one and when the alarm finally went off at 4am although I got up on automatic and started to get into the pre race routine, I didn't get  very far until i was held with yet another coughing fit however today the infection was in the sinuses and the chest so crap was coming out my chest and nose and i was in a really bad way. I guess thankfully at that point even though it was such a heart retching decision to have to make that I knew it was pretty black and white there was no way I could race. I was in contact with my coach in Boulder and he and Marc made the decision for me, I was in no state to even start.

So Sunday June the 8th was spent in a pretty budget hotel room bed feeling like crap, with cough mixture, panadol and lots of fluids. Not the day I had been envisioning in my mind on all the long training sessions in the weeks leading in thats for sure, but I guess if I had the mental toughness to race an ironman I had the strength to get through this day despite how sucky it felt.

So for what ever reasons Cairns was not meant to be. I have no doubt that I made the right decision however it doesn't make it any easier. The fact is I had put the work in, I was ready to race and I was in a really good space, and I am totally gutted that I didn't get that chance to express all the training I had done.

Of course though thats the nature of the game sometimes, it can be harsh world. but once I am back into  full health and training again I will be gearing up for my next race and another ironman, my time will come I just obviously will have to be patient!

The Impact of the ‘little Things’ and a Pretty Powerful ‘Little’ Bee!

I am a great believer in paying attention and been diligent to the little things in life with the belief that when working towards a bigger goal the consistent accumulation of the little aspects of this bigger goal is sometimes more significant in your progress than any one big event.  

Matthew Syed with his book, Bounce - the myth of talent and the power of practice, is somewhat challenging in its title but once you uncover his wisdom within the deeper pages of the book his rather brash title starts to make a lot of sense and works along the philosophy of respecting the power of the continual/repetitive build up of little things.

So when deciding to work with my new Coach Michael Lovato one of our key goals was to improve my ability to train consistently and make a change from the more periodical 3 week on 1 week off approach that I had been following. Change is always hard specially when the body perceives the change as stress but without stress there can be no stimulus to change. So over the last 6 months I have been working on building consistent training weeks and I am very happy to report that although its been challenging it’s working.

However as with all training there are sometimes periods where you are working firmly and you know your pushing limits but are still hitting the numbers and handling the load, feeling invincible and then Boom! Suddenly we are hit with a session that doesn’t go to plan you don't hit up your numbers or your times and your working hard but the results are not where they should be and our instant emotion in the heat of the frustration and fatigue can sometimes be that of failure and that suddenly after weeks of successful sessions we are very quick to forget that progress and render ourselves useless and not in shape. (Come on you know we have all been in that state of irrational thinking at some stage in our triathlon careers!!)

That's when the value of having a coach steps in and you have a non emotionally attached person to remind you of the ‘Little Things’…that its not about one key session going right or wrong its about the continual build up of the sessions and progressively gaining strength from those sessions as a whole. No one session can make you the athlete you want to be. Or to look at it another way – although key sessions that go to plan can be a tool for building great confidence in our ability and a huge boost pre race, I don’t believe that one training session can define you as an athlete and the form your in.

But in saying that, one then also has to respect the impact and power of the build of the little things in the opposite direction. Such as sometimes the body gets presented with stressors both internally and externally that on there own would not be a huge deal but with the load of one stressor on top of another and another on top of an already full training stress the power of this continual build up of so called “little things” in reverse has to be respected.

The challenge is however to do exactly that - respect the negative Impact and deal with it as needed but not allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the consistency of life's ability to just keep slapping you in the face. As assuredly I can tell you sometimes it can feel like exactly that.

So it would be that I have had to be reminded of both the positive and negative build up of the little things. And after experiencing the true positive effect of the continuous build up of little things through the last 6 months of working within the new training regime, I now have to recognise and respect the negative build up.

The last 3 weeks have been one of those challenging times in your life where you have a plan and a schedule and your excited about getting it done and then you find out that life has other ideas. Nothing major has gone wrong and for that I am truly thankful and this is not meant to be a whinging feel sorry for me type of blog entry. What this is meant to be is a encouragement to anyone else out there who is or has in the past had periods in there life where they have experienced this continual light slap in your face from life that after relentless slapping can stop you from moving forward.

 All I can say is random cluster effect. We live in a broken world therefore we will always have to face challenges at sometime in our lives. Whether they be of our own making – unavoidable consequences of our own choices or mistakes or simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time – fate or bad luck what ever you choose to recognise life’s ups and downs as. And yes it sucks but as my mum would say if you can persevere through  (and as long as there is an open door I think you should) it will be very character building...

However at some points in my life (say Gal Bladder Boulder 2012) I feel like surely I have enough character? But the fact is apparently you can never have enough.

So let me tell you about the last 3 weeks;

Week one was about dealing with a bike crash and a resulting pelvis lower back issue, an allergic reaction to a wasp sting and a DNF in the Auckland half, a disappointing crappy week but not the end of the world. Week two brought about a fresh start and ideas for building back into training, but as I said life sometimes has other ideas and Monday arrived and so did a stomach bug, so I plugged through that week patiently then just as I was coming right from that a delightful little bee ended that flash of optimism with a beauty of a sting in my left eye which by the next morning had left me completely swollen up and blind in that eye. The stunning selfie is below. (Yes I know I am been very brave publishing this selfie- not my prettiest moment)

The bike crash, wasp sting and tummy bug are all pretty much mundane trials of life but since the sting has an element of ridiculous yet impeccable timing of been in the wrong place at the wrong time I will tell you more detail….

The sting itself happened as I was cruising down Sand Stone Rd minding my own business on my way home from my first decent ride back from the stomach bug.

Thinking pretty much at that exact point how lucky I was to be out on my bike again and getting back into the plan, when fate would have it a bee (doing apparently the same thing except on his Saturday morning adventure was heading up hill) and I collided paths. He into the meniscal little gap between the rim of my sunglasses and the top of my eye. I refuse to give the little fellow credit that he was feeling vindictive and had such good aim he did this on purpose and choose to presume that on that Saturday lunchtime he was just as unlucky as I was and his morning of exercise and adventure was just as abruptly interrupted as mine… Or should I say life plans as if he was a bee I was unfortunately it for him.

Putting my initial “you have to be kidding me” aside I mean seriously another sting? I pulled up and tried in vain to blindly scrap the sting out. A quick TX to Marc was sent to let him know what had happened alluding to the fact that I may need a pick up as I had limited time before it swelled to much and unsure if I had enough time to get home before the eye closed up. If my calculations were right I had just enough time.

So the rest of my ride that was originally all about “lets get home before the rain hits” became a race against how quickly my body would absorb and react to the bee venom.

As luck would finally have it I got home fine.

Some how though I was still in a bit of denial about the Impact of the little bee and I was frustrated to have yet another thing to deal with (but to my defence I had never had a bee sting in the eye before and I have never had a bee sting on top of a very recent wasp sting on top of a low immune system after been sick) and found myself the next morning despite the fact that my eye was swelled shut and I was one eyed and feeling very much less than my normal self, lacing up determined to get out for a run. With the stubborn mindset we all know too well as triathletes that I am finally healthy enough to do some real training and after the 2 weeks I have just had this little bee sting isn't going to interfere.... this coupled with rational that there are lots of people who have to run with sight in only one eye and they have adapted therefore I will be fine.

However one should be smart enough to mix their determined optimism with a slant of wisdom and realism and realise that perhaps those very talented and inspiring people who do run with sight in only one eye took the time to allow there bodies to adapt. And that since my body was not exploding with huge amounts of cortisol flight response, as my body was no longer in danger that it was not going to miraculously adapt and allow me to run as normal. Yes some of us are reluctant learners... Struggling to see out of my sunglasses on an over cast day but resigned to wearing them as was Sunday morning family hour at the park and I didn't want to scare any one I struggled through the weird phenomenon of trying to move somewhat quickly over varying terrain with majorly compromised depth of perception. After 50 mins of trying to kid myself that all was okay the kink in the neck from the unskilled tipping of the head on all angles to see with one eye what normally I can with 2 I gave up and headed home.

The run was not smart or brave ... just putting it out there, it made the swelling worse so I finally left my cloud of denial and feeling slightly defeated I headed off to the A & E to get some major anti histamines and antibiotics. The lovely Marc escorted me and reminded me to keep my glasses on so as to not scare anyone, him politely alluding to the fact that yes I really did look that bad.

So here it is week three was spent recovering from the combo of the sting and the harsh drugs. Which at the tail end of the last couple weeks took a while. And it is here that I had to allow myself to not accept defeat but to respect the power of the little things because in this case, although all events were unrelated the impact of each event had a compounding effect on my bodies ability to deal with and recover from each incident, making each progressive incident a lot more powerful then if it had been an isolated effect.

But that's the key isn't it really and my point and I guess the lesson learnt for me that I will take with me to help further build my ‘character’ ... Is that if the body can respond so negatively in 3 weeks with continual little slaps in the face from the world it has to work In the reverse. Just imagine the positive effect in 3 weeks  where the little things do go in your favour... And then another 3 weeks and compound that with another... So as I said believe in the power of consistency of the little things. And they will build something very powerful.