While some countries are slowly opening up, and others are still shut down tight, the topic of our blogs has been responding to questions from our followers or situations that come up within our squad. However, the one I have steered well clear of has been the abundance of virtual races and the excitement they have caused in our tri community.
Not wanting to pour cold water on these in times when many are looking for an outlet, however the theme from our followers on an ever louder basis has been, where are your athletes? How come none of the 'Trisutto Champs' are performing? The more forward 'educate' me on what an opportunity I'm missing for my athletes. The second line of ever increasing pressure comes from Trisutto trained athletes - why won't you schedule us any of these great races? Everybody is doing it!
I can say that while the best in the world are out there battling it out, our best have been working very hard on other things. The 'angry bird' has learned piano, from scratch, and played me a tune this week, which is remarkable in itself. To get to that level in 9 weeks must have taken a huge chunk of practice time! So we used the time to learn a new skill that may help keep her calm and focussed on something else other than triathlon.
The Olympic champ has been hard at work being the best mum she can be, while contemplating her future as 2020 was to be her last year. Believe me three kids is a tough gig at the best of times, so she has no time or need to be hooking up trainers to TV sets to race in a totally fictitious reality.
I have not encouraged our age groupers to engage in the activity because of the boredom and frustration being caused by the lock down. Age groupers are vastly underrated in their competitiveness in anything they undertake. So I try to explain that to get all excited to punch out a race and then look at a result to measure where they are, is fantasy and one's time is better served by keeping fit and mentally fresh for when things get back to normal.
We do encourage people to use the virtual turbos and treadmills for certain sessions, when it suits their programme. I think there are a couple of positives to the 'new reality'. However racing is not one of them.
Like most things in human endeavour, the accuracy of results when one is left to their own devices can be misleading. Without making aspersions on people's character, we all see week in and week out when the courses don't force one to draft, participators sitting on the back of people's wheels, 10cm away rather than 10 metres.
Not being a tech guy, I don't know if there are systems in place that controls the urge of some, however I've played enough golf to know that what we see on television at the real tournaments where players call penalties on themselves, doesn't quite trickle down to the weekend hackers.., and many a ball is found in a better place than where one thought it would be found.
So we at Trisutto, for the old warriors, used the time to rest - to mentally and physically recharge the batteries of the 'many wars fought brigade'.
We used the time where possible to improve, given restrictions on what we were able to do. With no races on for at least 12 to 16 weeks the last thing I wanted my people to do was to get up in a very strenuous short season of pain when there was no season at all.
Once lockdowns are opened we will go about business as usual. Kona is in February not October. The Olympics in 2021 not 2020.
We don't know when the half world championship will be, but we do know WTC and Challenge will take your money in the lead up to them. That's the one sure thing we can put down in writing. Meanwhile I suggest to all, to be patient, as a better scholar than me said 'this too shall pass'.
When that does we will be mentally ready to get back to work and do a proper build up to the 'real' races and I can assure all, that when it does, there is a saying that should be well understood by all of us, and was penned by a person more to my intellect:
'When the flag drops the bullshit stops!'
We will be ready and I hope you will be too.