Adele Richards TT Blog: The Bunbury Classic

In a triathlon it can all come down to what goes well or what goes wrong on the day, it can be a piece of pie, or on the other hand a complete disappointment if something doesn’t go the way you planned. Competitors can become obsessed with the disappointment and forget about the positive aspects. It was a pretty windy day which made the swim quite choppy, regreting not preparing well in my wetsuit in the weeks leading up; I wasn’t happy with my swim. I made it out of the water being the 5th girl but a couple of minutes down. So heading out on the bike I was ready to go hard as this is the leg I feel most comfortable in, I came of the bike in 6th position about 3 minutes behind Kate Bevilaqua – leading female, but as I said earlier anything can go wrong. In the 7yrs I’ve been doing triathlons I have never had a penalty, until this day. I was given a 3minute penalty for “blocking” on the bike – my partner in crime Steven Gleeson went past me so I thought I’d have a bit of a chat..too bad the motorbike was behind me. So feeling a little angry at myself for being so silly I went out onto the run to try catch at least one of the girls that got past me in those 3 horrible, long,  minutes. I managed to catch one of the females and held a consistent pace. I would have finished in fifth place in the open females category with the 3 minute penalty taken away, but that wasn’t how it happened so 7th is the documented result. You can feel as disappointed as you like for things not going the way you’d hope, if you spend time dwelling on the negatives you won’t be in the right state of mind to learn from your mistakes and therefore tend to rule it out as a ‘failure’. Taking all the positives out of the race, I was happy with the result for 2 months prep, being the first race and I enjoyed it! I was happy to be out there again with no injuries and to get another O.D under my belt.