Racing Myself: Ironman 70.3 World Championships - Nice, France

a lot of fear and doubt in the weeks prior, but had gotten to a place of gratitude before race day

It's hard to explain how I feel about this race to people without it sounding like excuses, or like I'm giving up. It was neither. It was everything but that.

I took the Worlds slot for Nice BECAUSE it scared the shit out of me, and because I knew it didn't play to my strengths at all. This was my fifth 70.3 Worlds, and it felt like the hardest course I've raced, most specifically the bike. My real A-race this year was actually growing my coaching business, and that's gone better than I could have hoped. But it meant my own training took a back seat to that and to taking care of my athletes this year. I made my peace with that.  I kept a decent base of fitness, and for the first time in a long time I'm healthy - which is great, but it also meant I didn't have an extra gear in reserve. I knew going in it would be close.

The swim was the one part of the day I got to just enjoy. I love a good ocean swim. Mine was a little slow for me,  but felt strong and in control and ready for the day ahead. I came out of the water content.

You don't need to know who this was sent to to understand what it means <3

The bike is where the day was decided. The climb was the thing I'd been dreading and the thing I'd come here to test myself against - a brutal grade right from the start, 19% early on, where I walked for about the length of two light posts before getting back on and riding. Higher up, I watched several women around me walking, and I told myself: we're just going to go as far as we can. If I have to walk, I'll walk. But I really wanted to see if I could make it without. And I did. I was slow but not struggling right up until the last set of switchbacks, where I was completely convinced I was done. That's when I spotted the fork-and-spoon sign for the aid station. I've never been so happy to see an aid station in my life. Half a Coke, a gel shoved in my face, and I kept going.

I fueled as well as I possibly could out there. Near the top, when I started to fade, I stopped and drank half a bottle of Coke before the descent - and that turned out to be the thing that got me through it. The descent itself was technical and genuinely sketchy: open roads, cars and trucks sharing the course, rough surfaces. Part of me wanted to fly down it and make up time, because I love descending. But I wasn't willing to push past what felt safe, and I'm proud of that decision, even knowing what it cost me.

I was not slow up that climb because I lacked the ability. I know that. It was a training problem - a summer of travel meant I never did the course-specific work this climb demanded. That's a real lesson for next time, not an excuse.

The cutoff. I came into T2 already knowing I'd missed the bike cutoff. I was hoping I'd somehow snuck in under the wire and would still get to run, but I hadn't, and I didn’t. They'd already taken my shoes - no running, no sneaking out to finish anyway. World Championships means they take it seriously; there was no fence to hop.

Transition 2 was heavy. I was standing among women who possibly had never DNF'd before, and certainly didn’t want to on the world stage-and the emotion in that tent was raw - tears, screaming, real grief. A friend who works for Ironman found me and gave me a huge hug, and having him there let me actually process it in the moment instead of just swallowing it. I didn't fall apart the way some of the women around me did, and that's not because I cared less. It's because I'd already done what I needed to do for myself that day, and I knew it.

It's easy to look good coming out onto the Promenade :)

Where that leaves me. I didn't get the finish line, the medal, the day I pictured. Technically, by the numbers, I didn't succeed. But I did what I set out to do: I showed up for the thing that scared me, and I gave it everything I had. I've done enough Ironmans and 70.3s at this point that I don't have anything left to prove to anyone. What matters to me now is different - it's what challenges me, what lights me up, that I am still willing to learn and grow, what I'm still willing to be bad at in public.

There's a difference between failure and embarrassment. Failure is trying something and having it not work. Embarrassment is having people watch you try and not work. A lot of my stress in the weeks before this race was really just fear of embarrassment - and the moment I knew I hadn't made the cutoff, that fear was gone. What replaced it, strangely, was a real sense of accomplishment.

I know I can do this. I just have to do it better next time - and I will.

Possibly the hardest part of this is explaining to those asking how I’m doing that I am better than they expect. I'm not depressed. I'm not as disappointed as people probably expect me to be. What I have, for the first time in a while, is a fire in my belly. I'm on my way to the next level, and I'm not afraid to fail forward to get there.