Pontevedra: not quite the race I went there to have

A couple of days before I was due to race at the World Triathlon Championships in Pontevedra, my eldest broke his arm in two places. That probably says quite a lot about age-group racing.

There was no beautifully controlled taper into race week. My middle child had been off sick, my toddler had been running a temperature, and then came the phone call from school about the arm. We spent the evening trying to get an X-ray, only for the department to close while we were waiting, went somewhere else the following morning and eventually discovered that yes, it really was broken. In two places.

Then we got on a plane.

Our evening flight was delayed by about three and a half hours, so we landed in Portugal at around 3am. Thankfully we’d booked an airport hotel, although breakfast was practically opening by the time we arrived. The next day we had to drive up into Spain and we were so tired that we missed the turning for the house we were staying in several times. Somewhere in amongst all of this I changed my toddler and discovered that the temperature he’d had had turned into a fairly spectacular full-body rash.

By that point there wasn’t much left to do other than laugh. One child had a broken arm, another had been ill, the toddler was covered in spots, we were all exhausted and I had a World Championship to race in two days.

I think that is one of the things people don’t necessarily see about age-group sport. From the outside, qualifying for Great Britain, travelling abroad and racing at a World Championships sounds quite glamorous. And it is amazing. But nobody clears your diary because you’ve qualified. You are still somebody’s mum. There are still school calls, work, illnesses, washing, dogs, family logistics and all the normal bits of life happening around it. You just somehow fit the extraordinary bit in amongst all of that.

And I think that’s one of the reasons I love it.

My children get dragged around to races, they travel to places we might never otherwise have visited, and they see me doing things where the outcome is far from guaranteed. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s stressful and sometimes everybody would probably rather be at home, but I like that they see me having goals that exist alongside being their mum. For me, that is a big part of age-group racing: making an ordinary life a little less ordinary.

Getting to the start line

The day before the race I did the familiarisation swim. The course was in a saltwater river on an estuary, which was new territory for me. Living in the Cotswolds, most of my open-water swimming is in lakes, so currents aren’t something I have much experience of. I had done some homework though, and the general message in the age-group WhatsApp chat was that the current was negligible, so I wasn’t expecting it to play much of a part.

It therefore came as a bit of a surprise when my first 500 metres in the familiarisation swim took something like 11 minutes. I remember looking at my watch wondering what was going on. Then I turned around and suddenly I was flying. Clearly the current was rather less negligible than I’d expected. At least I thought I’d learned something useful for the following morning: if the first section felt very slow, don’t panic, because I’d get the benefit coming back.

While I was waiting to get into the water on race morning, I kept repeating the same quote to myself.

“The devil whispered in my ear, ‘You’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.’ Today I whispered in the devil’s ear, ‘I am the storm.’”

It’s become a racing mantra for me. Not because it makes me feel invincible, but because if I’m busy being the storm, I stop worrying about everything going on around me. It quietens my racing brain and lets me drop into hyperfocus. After everything involved in getting to Spain, that was exactly what I needed.

My first 500 metres on race morning was 8:20 and I was delighted. I found some good feet to draft behind, felt strong and immediately started doing that dangerous race-day maths where you extrapolate an entire finishing time from the first few minutes. The next 500 was 9:02, which still felt good.

Then I turned for home and discovered that the current was now working against us. That was the bit I hadn’t appreciated. Not only was it noticeable, it wasn’t behaving in the same way it had the evening before. The final section was considerably harder than I’d expected, but I kept swimming and eventually got out of the water somewhere around 20th in my age group.

I was really pleased with that. Going into the World Championships I’d thought that somewhere around the top 20 would be pretty bloody cool, and at that stage I was right in the sort of position I’d hoped I might be.

The bike changed everything

The bike course was essentially an out-and-back completed twice: climb a mountain, descend it, then do it again. Climbing suits me reasonably well. Descending is definitely an area where I have less confidence.

My bike setup didn’t help. My aero bars had been put back on after travelling in a position that didn’t really fit me, and we hadn’t checked them properly. My knees were hitting my elbows, so I couldn’t use them effectively. A very practical lesson for future races: check your own bloody bike.

Despite that, I was going reasonably well. There were three or four other GB women around me and we kept passing one another. I tended to gain ground climbing and lose some of it again on the descents.

On the second climb, a British athlete coming downhill towards me suffered a tyre blowout and crashed directly in front of me. He hit the road hard and initially lay completely still. There were no marshals immediately nearby, so I stopped, went over to him and started shouting at passing riders to get help.

I don’t remember there being much thought involved in the decision to stop. He was lying in the road and needed help, so I stopped.

Another British athlete eventually stopped as well and fortunately had paramedic experience. We stayed with him until medical help arrived and eventually an ambulance came. I think I was stationary for around ten minutes. But the ten minutes weren’t really the main issue.

Once I got back on my bike, I still had to finish the climb and then descend the same road. By the time I came back past, the injured athlete was being put into the ambulance, and I found I’d lost a lot of my confidence going downhill. I had just watched what coming off a bike at speed looked like. Telling myself to relax, get off the brakes and descend faster suddenly wasn’t quite so easy.

The women I had been racing around were long gone by then, and I never really got back into racing mode.

I finished the bike and went out onto the run, but by that point I was really just getting myself to the finish. The run itself was lovely: flat, smooth and very runnable. I just didn’t have much competitive fight left in me. I wanted to finish, find my family and have a beer.

I eventually finished somewhere around 52nd. The women I’d been riding around before the accident finished somewhere around the mid-30s.

Would I have finished around there too? Maybe. I might equally have had a terrible run and finished 52nd anyway. I’ll never know. And I think that uncertainty was what I found hardest.

Two things can be true

I knew I had done the right thing by stopping. I would make exactly the same decision again, and I don’t think there was really a decision to make in the moment. I was also really disappointed.

I had trained for two years with Pontevedra somewhere in the distance. My training certainly hadn’t been perfect, but a lot had gone into getting there: sessions fitted around children and work, injuries, training at home because it was the easiest way to get something done, organising the trip and all the other things that don’t appear on a race result.

The athlete later found us through the GB WhatsApp group and thanked us. He said he hoped it hadn’t ruined our races. I didn’t really know how to answer that, because ruined isn’t quite the right word. I didn’t regret stopping for a second, but the race I had been having up until that point was gone.

It took me a little while to accept that both of those things could be true. I could be completely comfortable with the decision I made and still feel gutted about the race I didn’t get to finish in the way I’d hoped.

Big goals absorb a lot of ordinary life. That was probably why it hit me harder than I expected afterwards. You aren’t only thinking about what happened on race day; you’re thinking about everything that went into getting yourself there in the first place.

What I actually came home with

Before Pontevedra I’d thought of the World Championships as a line in the sand. I had qualified, waited two years to go, and assumed that once I raced I would have some sort of answer about where I stood.

Instead, it now feels much more like a stepping stone.

I came home with more confidence in some areas and a very clear idea of what needs work in others. I coped with a swim environment that was completely unfamiliar to me. I raced on roads I didn’t know. I climbed well. I learned that my descending needs attention. I also came home realising that I’ve made quite a few perfectly reasonable-sounding excuses that have gradually made my training less enjoyable.

I don’t ride outside enough because it takes longer than getting on the Wattbike and our roads are full of potholes. I don’t always get to the pool because swimming involves driving there, changing, swimming, changing again and driving home. I train alone because organising other people adds another layer of complication. All of those things are true. But somewhere along the way I became very good at making training efficient and also managed to make some of it quite boring.

Shortly before Pontevedra I bumped into a local woman who has qualified for the 70.3 World Championships. She invited me to train with her and another woman locally who has also raced at that level. In the past I probably would have thought of all the reasons why training alone was easier. This time I realised I actually wanted to say yes.

I’m bored of always training on my own. I want to ride outside more, get more confident descending, swim more consistently and spend some time training with people who will challenge me. Mostly, I want some of the fun back. And somewhere in all of this I’ve apparently decided that next year I’m going longer.

70.3. Which is perhaps not the most obvious response to coming away disappointed from a World Championship, but here we are.

I still wish I knew what I could have done in Pontevedra. I suspect a small part of me will always be annoyed that I don’t. But I also came home wanting to become a better athlete rather than feeling as though I’d reached the end of something, and that feels important.

The storm mantra seems quite fitting in hindsight too. For me, it has never really been about overpowering everything around me. It’s about quietening the noise enough to focus on whatever is directly in front of me. There was quite a lot of noise that week. But there was also a World Championship, a family trip, a new place, a lot learned and another idea already forming about what comes next.

I have three children, work, a business, dogs, washing and all of the usual things that make up family life. I don’t want to escape any of that. I just really like occasionally adding something completely out of the ordinary to it. And for me, that’s what age-group racing does.

Thank you for taking the time to read 'Pontevedra: not quite the race I went there to have'.

Pontevedra: not quite the race I went there to have

by Pippa Marsden