Hi Everyone,
On the 18th May I participated in the national
Duathlon Championships. I was looking forward to this race as I was really determined to defend my title. I trained hard for it. In fact my training was
very encouraging. After coming back from my honey moon, I had 7 weeks of
training to prepare for the race. They were hard 7 weeks and in these 2 weeks I
participated in 2 races.
The first race was on the 21st April. I
participated in the last race on the MAAA 10km road running league. I was
expecting much from this race as I was still in the third week of pure
training. However I had a great result covering the distance in 34.30 coming 4th
overall and 3rd Maltese. The 2nd race was the Malta 113km Half
Ironman. I did only the 90km segment. Our team was composed of Steve chetcuti
swimmer and David Agius Lia the runner.
I was happy that we came first in the relay team competition. My
performance was good, however due to inexperience in doing such a long time
trail I didn’t paced it well and the last 30km were very painful. I covered the
90min in 2hrs 29mins with an average speed of 36km/hr.
The Duathlon was held at the Zebbug by pass and it consisted
of 8.5km run, 38km bike and 4.25km run. I started at a very fast pace. I was
leading the race together with another athlete. I was feeling good and
confident. However when I started the bike I had a shock. I started suffering
from cramps immediately in the first lap. I started to worry as it was a bad
sign. I was still leading the race but I could not make the difference. The
cramps continued to increase and I could nt push. The wind got stronger and
stronger by time and this didn’t help. Pushing with cramps was devastating for my
legs as then they got tired and slipped to second place. At that point I
noticed I lost the title
In the second run I still kept on pushing to get the lost
ground however cramps increased and at one point I stopped walking and then
continued to jog as much as I could till the finish line just to finish it
race. At one point I was going to stop as I could not run fast with all those
cramps and it was very frustrating. I finished the race in 4th
Place. I was very disappointed with this performance. I was not expecting such
results. The cramps ruined my race and even on the bike I was not that strong
as I was last year
After the race I talked to my coach and we discovered
several factors that all together led to such a result. We think that I got
dehydrated before the race because maybe I took a bit more coffee that usual as
I was feeling a bit nervous before the race and this results in severe cramps. Another factor was that it was a very bad
weather with strong winds and I rarely perform well in such conditions, and the
fact that I didn’t like the route as I never performed well on it was another
factor.
We looked a bit on the training and we think that since the
training was not targeted on this race specifically is another factor as we
have other targets in mind. Training is focused on drafting races for
international races so the bike intensity was decreased and since this year we
focused a lot on running because of the half marathon the cycling intensity was
decreased a lot compared to previous years. It is not a matter of fitness or
not training well as after the race I did a performance test and the results
clearly shows that I am in the best shape of my life as I registered a personal
best in it. We now did some arrangement in the training and in the nutrition in
order to avoid such a result again.
All the above factors altogether led to such a performance
and this means that it was not meant to be. I am still very disappointed as I
wanted to win but after a great season like last year a bad trace had to come.
Now I am back to training. Am feeling well and am looking forward for the next
races to be back on winning ways. I would like to that my sponsors, GARMIN
MALTA, STARBENE SHOP of Mosta, and BBB for their support. A big thanks to my
wife Elizabeth because she held my a lot during this difficult period after the
race in order to pick up myself and get back stronger
That’s all for now
Yours in Sport
Keith
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