After the disappointment of Madrid I found it hard to motivate myself. I was desperate to race again to give me a reason to keep training but my Achilles was still giving me problems. I got loads of physio treatment and when I managed a 30mins jog on the Friday I decided to risk racing in Windsor on the Sunday.

Windsor is a great race for spectator support and a favourite of mine because of my first pro race victory there in 2001. This time I wasn’t confident I would even finish the race let alone win. The elite entries and tough swim course suggested to me that the better swimmers would get away and never be caught. Indeed I was over a minute down on the leaders after the swim so I just decided to put my head down, get the other girls along side me organised and bike like a demon. Unbelievably we caught them after about 15km of the bike. I felt very comfortable as our lead pack of 5 came into T2. My race plan now was just to survive the 10km run. I felt a bit bad tracking Jodie for almost 10km and then sprinting past her in the last 400m to win but a victory with the minimum effort was just what the doctor ordered. I tuned into watch the race on Channel 4 afterwards but after seeing the attention Jenson Button got I did wonder how much coverage I’d get driving my car round Silverstone?!

Since Windsor I’ve had a cortisone injection in my Achilles which seems to have helped. It was a last resort as I’ve had this injury for over 3 months now and have only managed to run about a dozen times. I hope to race this weekend in the Hungary World Cup if all goes well this week.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 10:34 am and is filed under Andrea Whitcombe, Athlete Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.