Yo, today was a special day. Win or lose, doesn’t matter. This event has made a clear mark on everyone that participated, either beginner or expert, pro or amateur, team or individual, participants or bystanders. After today, pretty much everyone in Dubai has seen what triathlon is all about. on a personal note, i am very proud to have been a small part of it.

i have just recapped the race with my coach Lubos Bilek, and as a bottom i can say i am happy about the outcome. Although i never tell anyone, today i really wanted to win the event, not become second or third or fourth ( as it turned out to be ), but to win.

And in order to accomplish that, you have to take risks. Today that risk was to swim hard and not lose too much time to the front. I had a pretty good swim ( 26:20) on the 1.9k and once on the bike caught the leaders ( at that moment David Plese and Eric Watson ) after ca. 20k together with Macca, Nick Gates, Kevin T and Till Schramm.

Catching those guys was a decisive moment: thats when i took the risk to go together with David Plese during the rest of the bike and share the work. David put a small gap on me before the end and i got off the bike from him ca. 45sec later just shy of 2:08:00. it was a crazy bike with lots of strong swirling winds but mostly head on though.

now came the hardest: a very hot wind swept run. started off good but soon realized that i had to scale back a little bit to finish the run steadily. i am not the only who will tell you that the winds cross and head on the run were no small. plus the run was a bit too long ca. 800 metres, as you can tell by the very slow run times by pro standards, i managed to hold it together, but had to let Till and Kevin pass, who had a strategy to be a bit more conservative on the bike. i managed to get in at 1:30:00 which is slow for me, but under the circumstances it was acceptable.

hey, no risk no fun. thats racing. sometimes taking risks works out, sometimes it does not. today it did not work out.

racing professionally is much different than racing amateur. in the pros, you have not so much discrepancies, the performance output of everyone is much closer together that in the ams. in short words, more or less, everybody swims bikes and runs the same. It is the strategy and risk taking which make the difference whether you win or lose, so basically you have to be smart when you race and apply a proper strategy, whatever that maybe.

also i would like to congratulate David, Till and Kevin today for their performances. Well done, guys. My hat is off to you. super stuff.

also i would like to thank the Race Me team, Christian, Paul, Andy, Chrissie and all the others and the volunteers. well done to a great event.

see you all around. peace out

🙂 o dawg