Estimated readers, one more dream got checked off my list, and that was South Africa. It’s not like I was on vacation, doing safaris and sightseeing, but still, how many people get this opportunity to compete and see the world?!<\/p>\n
This is one post I slacked on writing, and it’s because I didn’t do well in the race. I couldn’t wait for that bad feeling to be over and restart fresh again. Nothing like a bad result to get me fired up and motivated to train. <\/p>\n
At that specific location, I knew I was gonna do poorly, because of the super hilly terrain. The reason I knew is because of the athletes with Cerebral Palsy (CP), they get an immense advantage on hills, having 2 legs. I don’t like complaining, but it’s not fair that they’re on the same category as us. For now, it is what it is, I just have to deal with it, and take a beating every now and then. <\/p>\n
Below are some technical details of the race, for those interested:<\/p>\n
-I had the best swim time of my category, but the crutching from water to Transition 1 (T1) was long, specially with the low tide. That helped the CP guys.
\n-Spent precious time in T1: for the first time, my wetsuit got tangled upon removal. With that, I also lost my timing chip that went flying away. I spent time putting the chip back in the velcro and the velcro back on my leg. By then, a lot of competitors were leaving T1 already. That momentarily killed my morale, because I knew I most definitely would not catch them anymore.
\n-When leaving on the bike, we crossed over this gate’s metal bar on the floor, that had been covered by a rubber mat. The impact from my speed made my precious PossAbilities water bottle fly away. Since I was too fast, I didn’t want to go back for the bottle and loose precious seconds… This meant I did the whole bike course on no water. This sucked because that’s where I drink water, and on the run if I feel the need. I don’t have water on transition anymore lately. With this I learned my bottle holder is too loose, I need to change that.
\n-Bike course was tough with hills, which helped the CP guys. I made a promise to myself to attack hills with more gusto from now on when training.
\n-Transition 2 (T2) was separated from T1, and bad for amputees also, it was a long inclined downhill stretch to run holding the bike on one leg with cleats. That sucked, and also helped the CP guys.
\n-Run course had a couple “false” hills, which you “almost” don’t feel. Those made for a bad time on my part. I was pretty dehydrated and felt my heart going wild after giving my all on a little hill.
\nAll in all, I knew it was gonna be a tough race. I guess I was pessimist, because you just never know what can happen… <\/p>\n
I’m still so happy to have been there, the people are amazing, so happy and so humble, and those are the memories I’ll keep. I really wanna go back one day. Thank you Team PossAbilities, Quest Diagnostics and Brazilian Triathlon Confederation for the support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Estimated readers, one more dream got checked off my list, and that was South Africa. It’s not like I was on vacation, doing safaris and sightseeing, but still, how many people get this opportunity to compete and see the world?! This is one post I slacked on writing, and it’s because I didn’t do well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"featured_image_src":{"landsacpe":false,"list":false,"medium":false,"full":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4954"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6706,"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954\/revisions\/6706"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teampossabilities.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}