Phil 17th in Elite World Duathlon Championships

After a long build up and recovery from my annual summer asthma and breathing problems I managed to get myself into good shape for the world Championships. With some autumn road racing over 5-10k-half marathon and bike criterium racing as well as solid progressive training and I found myself in the shape to be competitive in my 13th world Championships.

I ran really well in the first 10 km and found myself within a group of nine leaders. Knowing my competitors very well and that there were several 28 minutes 10 km I knew if the pace move up a level I could be in trouble. At 7.5 km the pace stepped up and three of us dropped off losing 20 seconds moving into the bike.

You never lose hope in these situations as often the leaders don’t want to exert too much energy on the bike and start looking around at each other to see who will work and they can be easy prey for the chasers. Despite a hard chase, on this occasion it never happened! The six leaders work brilliantly together putting more and more time it into me and the small group of riders that formed. There were only three of us working as the french and Belgian athletes with us had teammates in the break and wouldn’t work. After two laps we realised the time gap was going up and sat up to wait for some support from behind. The group from behind caught but we didn’t function well and continued to lose more time. It was then a race for seventh place. with 2 laps to go, I was caught sleeping and when a gap formed and lazily waited for others to chase. That didn’t happened and then I was racing for 14th position. I should know better after so many years of racing at this level but fatigue I can do funny things to your mind.

When we came off the bike my legs were good but not quite good enough to beat fellow competitors like French Grand Prix teammate Leo Stark who managed to pull away leaving me in 17th. People say “but you are the oldest man in the field, that’s great!” That’s nice but the results and history books don’t care about how old you are or your story of the race build up - they only show the results. However my story is as follows; I loved every minute of international Elite racing including the build up and travel after 2 years of no racing. I hope i get another chance in the next year or two to race better and pull on that GB vest “just one more time"!