My first race

A day in the Village seems to disappear so quickly. There is always so much to get done and it seems to take longer here than anywhere else. There is lots of walking to different parts of the village to eat, do washing, get online, have a massage or an ice bath. Recovery plays such a big part in modern sport. We have an ice bath centre in the Australian HQ with 5 blow up baths between 14 and 16 degrees. The compressive effect of the water combined with the temperature really helps your body recover and remain fresh for your next race. This paragraph was meant to justify how lazy I have been for not writing more in my blog it is not going well so I will move onto more interesting topics.

I had my first race yesterday. The 1km time trial (Kilo). I ran a time of 1:21.57. This was over 1.5 seconds faster than my previous best time and put me in 9^th place. The Kilo is a combined class race with the LC4 class. My team mate Greg Ball from QLD placed 3^rd in the event and was happy with his new PB and WR time. I have to admit that there were a few nerves before the race. It is different to skiing where you spend a lot of your time trying to keep the fear element out of your mind. Mostly fear of crashing or fear of hurting yourself. The risk of crashing or hurting your self is pretty low on the velodrome so I don't worry about that. I guess it is the fear of failure or of not racing to my expectations that I worry about most. In the end though the fears of nervousness were all unfounded and more about the process of getting mentally ready to perform than anything else.

Mentally my race wasn't so good yesterday. I had a lot of sensations similar to my first race back at nationals in February after being sick last year. Everything seemed to just happen at a very fast speed. I was riding the moment rather than making the moment happen, controlling it and my performance. I think when I am really mentally on the ball the race happens slower than normal speed in my head. Last time this happened I was able to come out and control things better in my next race so I am hopeful that I will be able to do that tomorrow in the pursuit.

Today is just about relaxing, watching my team mates race on TV and doing some recovery (massage and ice bath) as well as trying to catch up on things like washing and emails. I am sure that it will turn into a busy day but I am hopeful that I will get a chance for a nap sometime also.

Thanks for all for your support. The number of people sending me emails of support and SMS messages has been a great help. There has been lots of messages from Ballimore Public school near Dubbo, Red Hill Primary in Canberrra and I know that Goombungee school in Queensland will be putting their books down tomorrow to watch my race live.

I will try to write again after my next race.

MM