August has been a busy month, with training camps, results day and a race at the end of the month.
The month started with a training camp with the England Squad in France, whereby we were working with the French Federation and training with the French athletes. The camp was situated in Vittel, at the national Olympic preparation centre. It was a really good experience to train with different athletes and see what the French federation was doing differently to us.
After the camp in Vittel, I headed down to Morzine to train with some friends for a week. It was amazing to experience a different location and it provided more motivation and training opportunities.
After coming home, I had less than two weeks to prepare for the Eton Eliminator race.
This was set to be a tough race, with a heat in the morning, shortly followed by 3 races, in the format swim bike run, run bike swim and bike swim run. This made for some interesting and very hard racing.
The heat went well - although my swim wasn't great, I felt much stronger on the bike than I have previously this season, and managed to run well off the bike and gain a place in the B race for round 1 of the finals.
Round 1 of the finals was swim, bike, run again. I found myself chasing on the bike again this time, but again found my run legs and ran quite well. However I wasn't able to retain my place in the B race and dropped to the C race.
Round 2 of the finals was run, bike, swim. Starting the run I knew it was going to be a fast start, so stayed at the back and made my way to the front of the race with about 500m remaining, which put me in the large front bike pack. I stayed in this pack until the end of the bike, where there was a challenging transition as I had to put my hat and goggles on whilst running to the swim start. The swim didn't go well, as I dropped a few positions.
The last round of the finals was based off the accumulated time from round 1 and 2. I was placed in the D race. The format was bike, swim, run. The bike was hard, having to work in a group of 4 for the whole of the bike leg. The last round's swim went better than round 2, however still not perfect. As I went onto the run, I unfortunately got cramp in both of my hamstrings, and had to stop running as I couldn't carry on or walk. This dropped me down quite a few places into 17th, which I was a bit disappointed with as I knew that I was in better shape than this.
Overall, I wasn't too disappointed with this result, as it showed that I was in good form, shown by my performance in the first 2 races.
August was a really positive month for my training and racing. This year has been less than ideal so far, with lots of issues with illness, but I am finally starting to understand the root causes and I am looking forward to putting the work in consistently this winter.