Friday, April 1, 2011

In the end, it's your race

As Collegiate National Championships draw nearer, our team is talking about "carbo-loading" -  a phrase often misunderstood and taken to mean eating a TON of carbohydrates the evening before a race. Here's the thing - if you do that you're just going to poop your pants (or vomit). Sorry. It's true.

What I'm learning is that "carbo-loading" is a pre-race process that involves increasing the percentage of carbohydrates in your daily diet the week before the race. Note that I am also beginning to understand my CONSTANT craving for bowls upon bowls of cereal. It's a careful science, but as we all gear up to mess with out diets, our president sent out this video as a reminder of the horrifying things that happen when we don't take care of ourselves.

Alistar Brownlee falls apart

It's absolutely heart breaking. I know how hard triathletes work. I know what it's like to just be miserable at the end of the race and this poor kid is falling apart. Ugh. This may be pathetic, but I'm holding back tears for this guy. Watching him cross the finish line and be dragged off by doctors is just painful. Sure, athletes go through this all the time, but something about this skinny kid weaving to the end kills me. He's not some big, juiced-up guy who was tackled by 10 men - his body is shutting down.


Moral of the story: Kids, eat your vegetables!


(All that being said, the sighting technique in this video is unreal. I mean, as is all the technique. Also, notice they're not all riding tri-bikes... I wonder why. I mean, they all have aero bars but not tri-bikes.)

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