18/07/2022
Yesterday I raced the half distance Ironman Geneva. An amazing experience! I am very happy with how I did, considering the short preparation time and struggles with foot and leg injury in the past years. The goal was to keep the volume low, especially on the running and listen very carefully to the body. This was the hardest part as competitiveness and pushing as hard as I can comes more naturally to me than just keeping it easy. Also the results were surprisingly good as I finished 1st in my age category and 8 overall woman.
I try to practice what I preach so took it very serious to prepare myself well.
Race planning. I created best and worst case scenarios of how I wanted to race, when to eat and drink, my race pace etc. It wrote it all down and I committed to it. Following a plan during a long race is extremely helpful as during the race you tend to shut your brain down and your ability to keep on thinking straight significantly reduces (at least I do).
Visualization: parts of the race, the swim start (always very messy), the Australian exit during the swim (multi-lap swim), the transitions, the run and keeping a good rhythm.
Wrote on a piece of paper my goals, what it was I wanted to experience that day. So no focus on results, only on how and what to focus on during each phase of the race.
Wrote 2 mantra’s, which I used as ‘self-talk’ and repeated them several times the evening and morning before the race. During race, every time my mind wandered off and started doubting I spoke to myself and used my mantra’s to talk to me, often out loud!
Overall it was a beautiful course, the Geneva scenery is hard to beat. Icing on the cake was when the wind picked up around 9 (it became pretty windy), blew the Jet d’Eau aside and started to play with the sun, giving me a beautiful rainbow!
Thank you to everyone who supported me!
, , and for being my biggest fans
Millet , excellent coaching and being always available and
for borrowing me your amazing wheels, I am pretty sure they gave me wings!