Friday 14th January
Last week I headed down to Tauranga for the Port of Tauranga Half Ironman which was held on Saturday the 8th of January. This race once again was a big goal of mine for the season, a goal I have been working towards for the last year.. Going in to the final few days before the race I was on a real high I felt extremely confident I was in for a great race. I felt I was in the best physical condition I have ever been in and more importantly I was mentally in a very good place. Now this is where things started to go wrong on Friday night after the normal bike racking, briefing etc I headed back to the apartment where my family was staying and we had what I thought was a nice dinner. Turns out that so called nice dinner was the undoing of the months of hard work. My whole family in one form or another got hit with a terrible bout of food poisoning. Mark who was racing also was power chucking all morning before the race and although he started he didn’t make it on to the bike. I on the other hand didn’t have the symptoms of Mark or my mum for that matter who was also power chucking, I just had a dodgy stomach which I thought would not be an issue.. How wrong was I, I was more than capable of finishing the event but I was far from 100% I lacked power all day and my heart rate was doing strange things. It was so low and I just couldn’t get up to where it should be. So as you can imagine I am very disappointed I think I ended up coming 12 but to be honest I haven’t even looked at the results. I will now put this race behind me and turn my attention to Ironman NZ which is now 8 weeks away. I am very much looking forward to the challenge of improving on my 5th place last year and redeeming myself after the disappointment from the past weekend’s race. It really pains me when I can’t deliver a good performance after all the support I receive so I want to thank you for your continued support even in times when things don’t go our way.
Cheer James
P.s I cooked dinner on Friday night something I don’t think I will be doing again in a hurry which let’s face it isn’t a bad thing; there is always a silver lining!!
