This week I attended the bay of plenty secondary schools triathlon. I am from the Waikato but they haven’t held this event for us for the past few years due to health and safety reasons and not enough organisers.
For this event I was in the under 16 age group meaning it was a shorter course (300m swim, 12km bike, 3km run) the swim started average as I didn’t feel great but I stayed with the pack.
My transitions wasn’t the best but I still managed to get on to the bike without falling behind too much as that is key for me as it’s hard to have motivation without being close to the people your up against. During my bike I stayed pretty consistent, when I was starting to speed back up with about 3km left I was gaining on the girl in front of me, but my chain decided it was a good time fall off, so it took me a solid minute of wiggling and adjusting to get it back on and for me to get going again, by this point the girl in-front was long gone so I knew I just needed to get it done and be as fast as possible.
Again my transition to the run wasn’t my fastest but when I got into my run I was feeling strong to took advantage of this, I pushed myself to keep at a strong pace. Luckily I hadn’t dropped to much so in the last 500m of the race I over-took the girl in front of me and gained 3rd place.
This shows me that sometimes things like my chain falling off happen without notice but you can either give up or keep pushing and this time it was so my advantage that it wasn’t worse than it was.
– Jessica Bray