This weekend, Catriona took a big win in St. Croix, and she took it using a sense of discipline and strategy every athlete should strive to learn. It can be boiled down to this: race your race, not the race your competition is trying to dictate to you.
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Cat is the Long Course Duathlon World Champion. She can ride and run with practically anyone in the sport. However, that ability does not give her license to just do whatever she wants, whenever she wants to. Case in point, she and the person she’d eventually need to run down for the win this weekend came out of the water within seconds of each other. Her opponent immediately went to work trying to build a big lead on the bike.
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Cat had a choice to make here: give chase on the bike, ride harder than planned and then likely pay for it on the run, or ride according to the plan, and trust in her superior run skills to go for the win. Cat made the right choice. While the person out front was pushing hard, Catriona followed the power guidelines we established for her, and then came out with all guns blazing on the run. You’ve heard this story before…it’s the way Joanna set her World Record and won the 70.3 World Championships last fall. (You would have seen exactly the same strategy from Joanna on Sunday as well, had she not had a mechanical.) Rabbits will always try to bait you into playing their game, but this game is won by the smartest, not necessarily the swiftest.
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If you were listening to the radio coverage, you would have thought the race was all over. Coming out of transition, the leader really pushed it and took her lead to over 3 minutes. Within the first 10k, Cat had taken more than a minute out of her. Shortly thereafter, she cut it down to 52 seconds. Still, the comentators said, "That’s a lot."
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Cat smelled blood in the water, and realized her opportunity had come. By the time she came out of the Bucanneer, she was more than a minute in the lead and was extending it with every stride. She would win by about 3 minutes.
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The moral of the story is this: Make a smart plan, and then stick to it. This requires an enormous amount of self honesty and discipline. It is rare that an athlete can build an insurmountable lead on the bike, so don’t get into that game. It is senseless to try and pick up 3 minutes on the bike that you will pay back 2 or 3-fold on the run.
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You should know from training and from race simulations just how fast you can run after rides of differing intensity and length. If you don’t, start figuring it out! Use your power meter and GPS, and refine this knowledge into a dangerous weapon. Cat’s win was a suprise to a lot of people…but not to Cat and I. She didn’t have to put in a sudden, Herculean effort to try to save the day; she did exactly what we do in training week in and week out. However, she put in the right effort at the right time, and that is what made all the difference.
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Congrats, Catriona! Well done!
