one day after my DNF in Ironman
Lanzarote… doesn't feel too good. I think Christian Blummenfelt said “it hurts
more to lose” and it's definitely true. Morning the race. I wake up, I feel good,
and I check my Whoop. My Whoop is telling me I'm in good shape, HRV is super high,
recovery is good to say I've only had like five hours sleep. Yeah everything,
everything was alright, Apart from me forgetting my… I'd made a decision
to put a camelbak for aero purposes but also, because I need to drink so much
and I forgot it at the hotel. So, luckily, my girlfriend could
come back and get it before the race. But yeah, I had a few mechanical issues that
I was trying to sort out with the mechanic. So I was a little bit late to the start line but nothing, nothing major and I was in, I was I generally enjoy the start like I'm excited about an Ironman because you never know what you're in for. Ironman is… you can be the fittest athlete there and have something terrible happen to you, you know But when it comes to Ironman there's so many other parameters. It's such a long day that other parameters are coming to count and yeah. I had a good run into the water but then like, I don't know, I just dove in far too early and my goggles came off and anyway, but I managed to get away, I think I had maybe a 30 second gap on the second guy. After the first lap and then already on the second lap of the swim I started feeling weak, which is, which is rare. Normally, that's where I feel the strongest is in the second half of an Ironman swim. So I come out of the water first and I don't really, I don't really overthink how I'm feeling. I just focus on what I need to do. So making sure, I don't know, get my bag off from a helmet on, have a fast transition. Especially as generally, my first transition is slower than most people's because I put socks on. And then I also had this camelbak that I was putting in my try trisuit. I was hesitating with taking this camelbak or not because we knew it would be a little bit slower in terms of weight but I also have to drink a lot as I have such a high sweat rate and we calculated that I probably lose about 30 seconds overall. But in the end, I couldn't even drink it so yeah, I carried around this camelbak, this three litre camelbak for the whole race. And didn't even or maybe even… I think I drank about a litre of it. And I in my head I thought I drunk it over and when I got back to transition after the bike, I was carrying it because the run is like super long is like 800 metres I think, from when you pick your bag to get your bike and yeah so trying to carry this floppy camelbak around was probably not the best decision. And then yeah, I get onto the bike. I use the first three or four K to just keep it pretty chilled and like let the blood go into my legs. And then I just decided to ride at the power we thought I could hold. So on the hills I was doing like 380 390 400. If it really got steep, I would go up to like 450 watts. And the plan was to basically ride the slow sections
really fast and the fast sections much easier Keep it easy ! Sam, keep it easy ! Yeah! No I'm really happy he's just come through
68 kilometers so we'll find out at the moment he's going really really well he just pulled
it away from Cam so I'm quite happy that he's feeling quite strong I just hope he's not gone
too hard on the first part of the bike course because the next part obviously we're heading up to the top up there it's quite high and quite hard And yeah, I felt fine for an hour. I felt really normal. Like power is good. Everything is fine. I didn't have any muscular niggles or anything. And actually, I felt fine up until about two hours. Actually, I had two mechanical issues. My chain kept dropping and once had to stop. But, um, during that period, I was still pulling away from everybody, even Cam who went on to have the fastest bike split, but I yeah, so I think at the 80k mark I had a five minute lead on Cam. I had about a 10 minute lead on Arthur who won. And yeah, just… I'm so stupid that in my head rather
than thinking “oh, maybe… maybe I should slow it down a bit and like just that's plenty of time to run a good marathon” in my head I wanted to make that 15 minutes or 20 minutes and so I keep pushing and yeah, yesterday I just couldn't after two and a half hours like suddenly just everything's gone and I couldn't even hold like the watts that I normally doing training. And so actually I ended up with like my overall power for the ride is very similar to lots of the rides I've - done in training where I averaged like 120 heart rates. So that's pretty sad to see. I don't know if it's partly a pacing mistake but also partly me believing that on a good day I can hold that until the end of the ride. Then I came, finished the bike. I, well, I say, I say, I just finished the bike, the last two hours of the bike were terrible. I really felt like I had nothing left. I really felt like I had nothing left. Cam came past me and like, it looked like I had never been on a bike in my life. a bike in my life. And yeah, I was, in some sense I'm quite proud of myself or even finishing the bike because I really felt like stopping like a million times then and it was a real real mental battle the last two hours on the bike and then I… When I made it to transition, everybody like my… both Arthur's girlfriend and my girlfriend and everybody was at the transition where I was and I was in such a state, like I was cramping and I was trying to hide it, like not showing people that I'm bad. I'm bad. And the last thing I felt like doing was going and running a marathon. And so I was like, “Okay, right just start and try and do one kilometre to see how you are”. I guess racing is always that. It's like you keep having these mental barriers and you can think “oh, just try a little bit longer or just hurt a little bit more”. I did one kilometre at like 4,10 per k pace, then kind of loosened up a bit and did another kilometre and just kept telling myself “I'll just keep doing a kilometre, keep doing a kilometre” And so there was this one point where I realised that I'd ran… Cam Wurf had a four minute lead out of the run and then after like 10k, it was down to less than two minutes and at 20k I'd caught him up. So during that period, I was like, I was like, “ Bloody hell”, I was like “if I turn this around, and manage to win this thing this would be the biggest mental victory of my life” because I was in a really really dark place. um and then as soon as I overtook Cameron
and was running into first then like I was like really in a bad State and realized
that I was properly empty um but I I almost knew it was coming, you know, anreally surprised that I managed to run 22k at the pace that I wanted to because actually, in the past I've run half Ironman slower than that
So yeah, there wasn't a switch, it was just me constantly telling myself to “keep going, keep going” until I really can't. “keep going, keep going” until I really can't. And I think in the past, I would have already probably
given up on the bike. And for me, it's just a slight victory that I got that far. If I stopped it's really because like people pretty much pulled me off the course because I was just not in a good state. I walked for maybe 2K, If you can call it walking and then yeah I was like just really cold even though it 30+ degrees. Sam, come on! Keep it going And, I went back home. And just like shivered in bed for three hours. And pissed myself. In Benoit's bed So Benoit lent me his bed so I could die and I then peed in it. And it made me question if I should do triathlon or snooker or darts or something because it's probably much easier. Yeah, I mean, that moment where you realise you've blown up is always difficult because on the one hand you want to finish for respect of the event and the sport itself and your competitors.
And on the other hand, there's races down the line and like walking 20k when you're already having heat stroke it's definitely gonna slow down your recovery, but I don't even ask myself these questions, to be honest. It's more like yesterday was really just because I couldn't, I couldn't go any further. I was like even just laying down felt terrible. So there was no way I could have finished the 20k. So yeah, I just I just kept going until I couldn't. So of course, I feel.
I feel bad for not finishing, I think. I think it always looks better for athletes who do win if I do finish 30 minutes behind and not finish at all, you know, because it's easy, it's easy to say, oh well Sam just DNF'd rather than say no or Sam was an hour behind. So but the reality is it, if I DNF it's because I wouldn't have been one hour behind, I would have been like three hours behind. I hope that it doesn't take away anything from the guys who won the podiums performance, because they really had an amazing day. And of course, that leads us on to Arthur’s performance, which saved the day, really. And it's one of the reasons I'm still quite upbeat about it because I personally have had a lot of input into his racing over the last two years. And my dad has as well and my whole family actually. Yeah. I mean, we kind of… he's been living really with the Laidlows for… since the start of year. And he was fundamental to my victory in Gran Canaria. And for three months he was training with me and just like thinking he was, he was s**** basically, because I've been going quite well in training, and I think yesterday was a reward of him enduring them three months of struggles. And he thoroughly deserves it. I mean, I knew he was capable of running really well And he's one of them guys who races really well. So, his training numbers are slightly below what his racing numbers are. And I think, I feel at the moment that I'm the other way around, like my training numbers are much higher than my racing numbers, which is something I need to figure out. Yeah, so it's just he really saved the day and on the one hand, I'm really frustrated with my own performance but I know that I've also made somebody's day and I hope career. I hope this will open some doors for him and that we'll keep on winning races together and if it's not me, then it'll be him. And I genuinely feel that he could do something good in the sport, especially on a course like Nice, which suits him, and it's great to play a part in that performance. It's really good to see Arthur taking the
top step of the podium a big big development and obviously my heart sank for Sam all the hard
work everything else I put into a race like that and uh it's a DNF, it's not good but we're
back to the drawing board and carry on working it's a horrible feeling, it's like I mean I've had that even after finishing Ironman's like
you don't know, you don't know what your body wants even if you wants to lay down and if you want to cold shower, if you want to eat, if you want to drink and whatever you try and do your body just rejects it. just rejects it. And I think a lot of even age groups can relate to that feeling when you finish the race, you're just in such a bad state. Like It's almost as if your body just wants to die and... I didn't think I'd fallen asleep, but apparently I had because obviously I woke up and realised I peed myself but I don't look at social media too much. But that being said, I'm amazed actually how many nice messages I got. That really helps me. It's one of the positives of also exposing your career and your highs and your lows is that I realised that a lot of people really believe in me and - that's great because it's it makes it easier in some sense, people believe in you for a reason and now I know that people still believe in me which is one of the positives of having a small community and fan base. I think the fundamental problem of yesterday I think we know what it is. I just wasn't strict enough about getting it sorted. We found out two or three years ago my doctors that have like
a pretty fragile gut like a leaky gut syndrome which can be caused by either stress or just training or heat exhaustion or so many factors and we managed to get on top of it last year. And that explained my great performances in Kona and in other races. But for me, my stomach is really like my achilles heel. And we saw that in the Collins Cup, for instance, where, like as soon as my stomach isn't right, then I can't perform and that was definitely yesterday's issue. And it's just reminded me I need to be more serious with it, which will involve doing some more tests and I don't know, taking some more probiotics or eating less gluten or blah blah blah, but Yeah, it's It's just something I need to be more aware of and I I think and my coach believes that, that's the reason why I had such a poor performance But Yeah, so we'll see. We're trying to figure out and go to Roth and hopefully have a better day. So as my performance was so bad, I am stopping triathlon, becoming a youtuber and going camel riding and karting so please subscribe to my now profession, which is YouTube.
