Tough as a coffin nail (Box Hill Spring Ball Buster Duathlon Race Report)

Alternative names for this post (will become clear in below ramblings or later postings, as I'm eating a Full English Breakfast whilst writing this and may veer into a food coma):

Box Hill Spring Ball Buster Duathlon Race Report

Respect (fear of failure)

Chicked

One of my favourite podcasts is offthebike.com's. It makes the world of professional half and full ironman triathlon racing accessible to someone who has only been in the sport a few years. One of the hosts, Phil Wrocna, has described some of the sport's best as 'tough as coffin nails' (eg. the Brownlee brothers).

It dawned on me after hearing this term thrown around several times, that in the medium to long term this is my goal: to be tough as a coffin nail (with a spirit of fun and a smile on my face).

I entered this Spring Ball Buster Duathlon (8mi/24mi/8mi or approximately 13km/40km/13km run/ride/run) several months ago. The most thought I gave to it was tapering a little (which I didn't have to think about, it was just programmed), renting a car and checking the weather. I had this stupid idea in my head that it was about a 50 minute drive from when I checked the map ages ago.

After stuffing my bike in the car (and dawdling too long over breakfast) I stifled panic when GoogleMaps told me it was an 80 minute trip. I arrived at the race to see a lot of very professional looking people jogging about. I had 10 minutes to register, rack my bike and get on the move.

Thanks to some VERY helpful and accommodating marshals I managed to get started only about 5 minutes late. During my woeful transition from run to bike (while I pretty much stuffed a banana and muesli bar into my mouth whole, as I still haven't figured out a way to eat on the bike with ski gloves on) the transition coordinator reiterated that I had to be back running by the 11am cutoff. A deadline I made with only minutes to spare (and a fact I'm not sure whether to be proud of, or embarrassed).

As I ran my bike back into transition (after spending most of the third lap passing people on their final run) I heard that the overall winner had come in, and it was a she!! As I ran out of transition she was going for a cool down jog, and she batted off my congratulations (it was very close, she said) and offered me some words of encouragement. Every man that raced today was chicked! Awesome!

Despite a rubbish start to the day I was happy with how I ran, cycled and ran. Although I'm completely spent now I still think I could have pushed harder. But I'm more proud of how I handled everything that didn't go to plan. I could have not started. I could have just done a two lap ride under the guise of making the cutoff, or just not done the second run. I could have walked up the 2km hill to the finish line. But I didn't. I raced with a massive smile on my face, in a spirit of fun, and I choose to take what the marshals said as I came out of transition for the final run (good on you, you made the cut off!) as the compliment that was meant.