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Feeling a little flat…

Unfortunately Lady Luck wasn’t on my side at the weekend @ Windsor. A flat rear tyre early on in the bike – and no spares or CO2 – meant it was game over before the fun had even started. I was out of the water in fourth place and was then looking forward to working hard on the bike to get up amongst it. I’ve been riding really strongly recently & I believe a top three finish yesterday was well within my capabilities.

Instead, I sat chatting to marshalls on the roadside while waiting to be picked up by the broom wagon! But looking on the bright side, it has certainly taught me a few things:

1. Always carry some means of fixing it, no matter how short the race (it was incredibly frustrating yesterday). Big thanks to Paul Gardiner – I think that was your name – who stopped while I was roadside to see if I was OK and kindly donated some tyre sealant. I’d been roadside for 30mins+ by then so it wasn’t worth getting back on but I’ll be carrying that next time!

2. I saw “the other side” of the race which you never appreciate when you’ve got your racer’s head on. While sat in the marshalls car waiting for the broom wagon, I could hear the various communications over the radio system between the marshalls throughout the 40k course & race HQ – a very slick operation I must say. I don’t think athletes realise or appreciate half of what goes on behind the scenes to make the races the great events they are. John Lunt & Human Race did a terrific job yesterday, Windsor is a truly great race – hopefully next year I’ll get to finish what I started this year!

3. My legs are fresh today so I can get back into training much sooner than anticipated ;-) Bring on that next race…and NO flats!

Huge thanks to my family for getting up at silly o’clock to come to watch me race yesterday. They saw me briefly at the swim exit and were then very surprised to get a call from me at about the time they thought I’d be coming into T2 – d’oh! Needless to say the jokes started coming thick and fast on the way home: “What’s up Eek, feeling a little deflated?”, “Bit tyre-d are we?”, “Didn’t you get pumped up enough for this race then?!”…A right bunch of comedians, all of them ;-)

Happy (puncture-free!) training & racing
EK

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 9:24 am and is filed under Athlete Diaries, Emma-Kate Lidbury. 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.