Today was going to be my big day to make my mark in Paralympic Handcycling. Everything in the days leading to today showed that I’m in the best form ever and I was mentally and physically ready to go out there to do the best individual time trial the sport has ever seen but it was not to be. Yesterday I developed a slight case of gastro and at first I thought it was just a case of an upset stomach but by the evening I realized it was a bit more. Saw the doc and got something to stop it and got some re-hydration stuff. I did not sleep well during the night and woke up feeling a bit numb, but at this level you need to be able to bag it and focus in the task at hand so I just did that.

We left the village at around 7 and headed out to the course. As we drove up I realized that there were spectators just everywhere. I felt hyped up but still calm and went through the whole warm up process and got into the zone. I did notice that the wind was a lot stronger than on any of our training day’s and it was also coming out of the opposite direction which meant we would have a head wind on the steepest climb. I was the last to start, which should have favored me as I could use the splits from the guys in front of me to pace myself. I took off and climbed up the first hill and about half way up realized that I was not feeling well at all. Just 3km into the race it felt like my head wanted to explode and just felt so overheated. After the race I checked the temperature and it was over 36 degrees! So under normal circumstances my pace should have been perfect but when I looked down at my heart rate I realized I was completely in the red zone and I was running at my maximum and there was still 10k to go! This is where the time trial becomes a true test. For some reason management screwed up and there was no other splits for me on the course so I was racing ‘in the dark’ with no idea of how hard I needed to go. My heart rate never came down below 187 for the entire race but I kept pushing as hard as I could. As I came into the last 1km stretch I could see the second ranked athlete about 1 min in front of me. I went as hard as I could but with so little distance left there was not much I could do. I crossed the line 2 seconds behind him but soon learned that there had been two other athletes that went even faster that us. Had I know it was so close between the two of us I probably could have squeezed a few more seconds out of what I had and came in for bronze but things will never be perfect and they were not today. My average heart rate for the 21min time trial today was 189, the highest I’ve ever gone but also the lowest ave speed I’ve ever had so obviously my body was nowhere near optimal today. I just hope that I will be able to recover by Sunday and be ready to give what I had trained for so hard and deliver my first gold medal.

Tomorrow I will take it easy and try to leave the disappointment of today behind and get ready for a new day and a new race on Sunday.