During the week leading up to this race I had a bit of a foot problem. Not sure what it was but I thought it would be gone by sunday. On saturday I had an 30min run planned but I had to stop after 20min because I was limping :-S a bit worried .. During the night it got even worse and when I woke up on sunday I knew I couldn’t run on it. so what’s the point of racing then.. Thank god, i’ve got 2 great coaches who convinced me to start and don’t do the run.
Off we went to Geel. It was a really warm day and quite windy as well. I had to make sure that I would drink enough! Got my numbers, put my running shoes in T2(just so I had shoes to wear after the bike leg) and then rode to T1 and the swim start with Evy and Katrien. Reiny and Wim had to walk down there and it was a bit of a hike.. from T1 it was 1500 down the canal to the swim start. Great, foot was fucked by the time I had to start.
Because of the warm temperatures it took me a while to get my wetsuit on. pretty hard when you’re sweating :-S the water was nice a refreshing but we didn’t get much time enjoy it. people were all crowded up and pushy on the right side of the canal so I just swam to the left to get some more room and concentrate on a good stroke and speed. I felt pretty good during the swim, practiced my sighting a bit(I even spotted Reiny!) and tried different stroke rates.
we had to turn around a buoy as well and I got a bit aggro with some people trying to push me out of the way. I passed at least 3 swimmers :-) don’t be fooled by the innocent face.. hehe
I finished to swim in 22:15 so quite happy with that!
My bike was very close to the swim finish so I didn’t have to ‘run’ very far. couldn’t get my wetsuit over my left foot(sore one) so lost some time there. grabbed my bike and started hobbling towards the T1 exit. this took my a little while because I couldn’t put much pressure on my foot and several girls passed me. I was very happy to be on the bike and in my shoes, ready to hammer it. Legs weren’t too great the 1st lap but they got better through the 2nd and 3rd. We had to ride over a little bridge over the water with some cobbles on each side and take a sharp right hand corner straight after. I put a lot of pressure on my left foot to go around the corner and CRAACCCK. painfull for a second. after the 2nd lap, Dirk was yelling out: you almost got her!! and I was thinking: who the fuck is he talking about? but then I saw Evy in front of me, so I guess he ment her. As I didn’t think I was gonna start my run I wanted to go past her and tried to get her to sit on legal distance behind me but still close enough to get some benefit from it. Looked back a couple of times and it looked like she could follow so I kept going at a nice pace. Passed another couple of riders on the ‘climb of the day’ and a few km’s further T2 was coming up. for a moment I really wanted to put on those running shoes and do my run but I thought the risk was too big. I didn’t want to seriously injure my foot so I carefully jumped of my bike and walked to my shoes. race over.
when I checked my speedo it said 1:11: something, so that’s from grabbing my bike in T1, hobbling down to exit T1, ride 40,9 km and put my bike in the rack at T2. so I guess the bike leg was allright as well. Still would of like to finish my race though.
I rang the Osteo on monday morning and he fixed my foot the same day. Just a little bone that wasn’t exactly in place and causing me grief. bugger. good news is that I can do all my training again though. If I would of finished my race on sunday I might of done something bad to it and wouldn’t be able to do my long runs this week. And i’ll need those long runs with my 70.3 in Rapperswil coming up in 4 weeks..
