Race in TISZI

Well we are in Europe for racing and training, some of the training has been done and now it was time for some racing. The first race on the calendar was the Tiszi European Cup. We arrived in Tiszaujvaros at 2pm on Friday afternoon after a long 9 hour trip from Radojvlica, Slovenia. We stayed at the Phoenix Hotel, the official race hotel. After we unpacked, it was lunch time – food from the local Spar.

After lunch we went for a quick jog just to get the stiffness out our legs from the bus trip. I felt good in the beginning of the run but towards the end my legs started to feel very heavy, I thought to myself well okay tomorrow (race day) will be a very long and painful day. After the run, the race briefing was held, there I could catch a glimpse of my competitors. All the athletes looked very focused for the race and I was quite relaxed. They announced that the race was in a funny format but the total distance will be the same as normal junior events. The format would be: 2.5km run, 10km bike, 750m swim, 10km bike followed by 2.5 run. It was going to be a hard race, everyone would start running together and go flat taps all the way. But I had good training background so I knew if I was feeling good I can hopefully stick with them.

We wanted to go for a quick cycle late in the afternoon but a huge freak storm prevented us from that, so that didn’t help me calm my nerves. Lucky my race was only at 3pm the next day so I knew there would be time the next morning to go for a quick cycle just to test the legs and check out the route.


Getting ready before the race

 Time didn’t go by very quick on race day, because the race was only late in the afternoon. This spoiled the whole day because you can’t really do something else except focus on the race. I was in the room the whole day just relaxing and watching TV until it was time to rack my bike and do the pre-race warm-up. I was lucky my race number was 6 so I had a good spot in transition.

I went for my warm-up hoping that my legs would feel better than it had the day before. I was in luck as my legs felt fine through the whole warm-up. Finally, it was time to line up at the start and it was intense as everyone was ready to race and looked so focused. The horn went off and we started off at a blistering pace on the first run. My thoughts from yesterday came back to me about this being a long and hard race. After about 1km, a group of about 6 athletes including myself made a break from the rest of the field and when I realised that, I knew that this will be a good race. We entered into transition with only a few seconds ahead of the rest of the field. Sadly the group didn’t want to work together on the bike and the main field caught us just before transition.

The swim leg was next and I was feeling a bit anxious about it because we were all together and I didn’t know the other athletes swim speed. During the swim and we exchanged a few kicks and punches, but it went by pretty fast. When I got out the water I was in the top 6 position. We were all together except for Henri which had a 25sec gap on us. In the front pack were 6 athletes chasing Henri and we caught him on the bike leg just after the turn around point. Suddenly everybody stopped working. It was a huge task to get them to work a bit to stay ahead of the main pack. I knew then that the race would come down to the last run.

I felt pretty good coming of the bike, but the Hungarians were flying out of transition and at some stage I thought well 4th place is good, but it sucks coming 4th. So I decided to dig deep and hope to catch at least 1 guy. Then at 500m into the second run the overall winner caught me, I was in 5th place but slowly creeping my way back to the Hungarian currently in 4th. When I reached him a gave a big surge to pass him, hoping to demoralize him and not wanting him to follow me for a sprint finish. My plan worked kind of - as I passed him and he looked tired but he crawled his way back to me with 300m to go. The crowd was going mad cheering the local guy on to beat me. I dug really deep and just held on to beat him. I was in 4th place, I was happy about that in my first race of the tour. This race was really hard, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

At the prize giving ceremony, we heard that one guy was disqualified so I got 3rd position. This was AWESOME. I couldn’t believe that in the first race I was on the podium. So after this start I hope that the rest of the tour will be as successful as the first race.


On the podium (4th from right)

 Thank you to all my sponsors and everybody who believes in me.