Natalie Van Coevorden: Monthly Report- Jan

Where has January gone? From celebrating the New Year to celebrating us as Australians, it has flown past. For most of it, I enjoyed my time in altitude. Lacking the presence of oxygen, this did not faze us. We trained hard and co mpleted long days pushing ourselves with everything we had, with the aqueduct of freezing cold water being our reward. We were lucky enough to have a few visitors including AIS dietician Greg Cox, Pete Kerry our massage therapist and comedian and Lisa who took some great shots of us in action. Felt a little overwhelmed with a photographer popping out of the bush! We learnt about healthy cooking, food we should be introducing into diet and important foods necess ary to enhance and maintain performance.

NSWIS testing arose again to see how we were all travelling after our altitude camp and I was happy to see changes in my aerobic capacity heart rate and VO2 max. A few days ago we had a presentation done by Kell and Kristie on self confidence and social media. Both these have given me a new insight and help me reflect on myself and change of things I do in my training and skills that I can incorporate. 

Australia Day Aquathon, my 4th year in competing, I had gotten a 4th, 3rd and a 2nd.. a win would be nice. Feeling good after coming down from altitude I wanted to make the most of it. Getting a good swim start and continuing this I got a 30 second lead over the other girls in the swim and wanted to keep that for the rest of the race. I told myself never to look back, keep on your toes, pop and to continue to think what Bobby had told me to work on. Holding my lead, I was happy to get the win for the day and now train hard for NZ. 

This month as a group at NSWIS, we have been speaking about being 75% athlete and 25% person. For example, we can all run a 400m race but the first 300m is our physical fitness, that last 100m is the person who finds that confidence, persistence and positive self talk to push themselves to the end. This has definitely got myself thinking about my mental skills and I am happy to be in such a supportive environment at NSWIS, with my coach, my parents and my training partners. 

I watched a video this month by Jan Frodeno. He gave me a good insight into what I see triathlon as. Triathlon gives us an identity- something that we love doing day in day out. It gives us an honest measure in life that we go against ourselves and others with the day being either being brutally honest or brutally wonderful. It gives us great feelings of the strengths and weakness of ourselves but overall we do this sport because we enjoy it. I am happy to say my training is going well and I hope that the next few races I can develop and learn as an athlete moving up into under 23 for 2012.