My mental game

So I've been meaning to share my race result from this weekend with you all for a while now, and haven't had the time. Sorry. Here it goes:

this was an olympic distance tri. I was very unprepared for it: I haven't done one of these in years, so I was a little scared. I also haven't done an open-water swim in years either. I've also been only training for the bike for the past months, and hardly running or swimming at all. My school's cycling team got accepted to go to nationals this year, so I had to keep training for that. Anyway, since I was so unprepared, I knew it was going to be a tough race mentally. The night before, as I was getting ready for bed, I kept saying to myself: I'm mentally tough, I'm mentally tough. To that I added other thing, little personal goals for each leg: I'm mentally tough, I will swim nothing but freestyle. Stuff like that.

So...race morning. It's COLD outside, and the water is cold too. My shoulder was acting funny while I was warming up - I recently dislocated my shoulder, a little over a month ago in a bike race. It was clicking and stuff because of the wetsuit but once I actually started swimming it went away. The start was a mass start, with all 200 entrants going at once. I started off to the right side of the pack, and avoided most of the rough stuff. A lot of people were complaining about getting kicked and pushed around and stuff, but I was fine. I swam really hard for the first 100-200 meters to get myself on the quicker side of the pack. I split happened between the faster swimmers and the regular swimmers, and I didn't quite make it onto the back end of the breakaway. I swam in between the two groups for most of the swim, but I did fine. I didn't get too off course. My transition went really well. I haven't taken a wetsuit off in a while, but it wasn't as hard as I'd remembered. I slipped on a jersey to keep me warm, and put on my shoes this time (normally I have my shoes clipped in and put them on while I'm riding - I think putting them on this way saved me time actually!). Once on the bike, I put the pedal to the medal. I knew my run was a lost cause, so I wanted to build up the biggest lead I could on the bike. I started passing people left and right. I made a fairly large mistake by only taking one bottle of protein drink along with me. My mouth was chalky the whole way, and it was really hard to wash down goo with - water would have been much better. I'll do that next time. I got out of the water 20th, and was third by the time I finished my bike. My T2 was the fastest of the day (23 seconds!). I was smart enough to leave a full bottle of water at the transition zone, so I quenched my thirst when I was transitioning. I started getting passed pretty soon into the run. I held on the best I could, and finished 9th overall, 2nd in my age group. Not bad at all! Without all my mental preparation the night before, I don't think I would have done nearly as well.

Check out the result at www.racecenter.com
it's called the onionman triathlon