Olympians....

What an amazing few weeks.... with the Beijing games over, Team GB are set for a triumphant return having done us all extremely proud with the biggest medal haul in many many years. With my athletic endeavours having been put on hold for the last seven days (see last week's post) today's thoughts were always going to centre around our Olympic heroes and with stunning success in such a wide range of sports we can look forward with great confidence and excitement to 2012. I really hope that Team GB don't suffer from the same fate that the England Rugby team did after winning the world cup or the Cricket team following their amazing Ashes victory... complacency is a dangerous thing and you can be sure that the Aussies and Germans, to name just two of our closest sporting rivals, will be training with renewed vigour with the aim of finishing higher in the medal table come four years time. Following Wimbledon this year I heard a great quote about Raphael Nadal... apparently his 'mantra' is that no matter how successful he becomes he will always remain 'hungry and humble'... lets hope our future Olympians follow the same path...

So what does it mean to be an Olympian, and how can we as working athletes apply the same thoughts and actions in our own athletic and also non-athletic lives? With so many wonderful performances it's difficult to single out specific individuals, although it is rather hard to look past the mens coxless four (rowing) or the team pursuit lads (cycling) for examples of true personal excellence. However, being an Olympian has little to do with winning medals... it is much more to do with a certain attitude....

What do I mean by this? Perennial under performer Phillips Idowu may have won silver but listening to an interview with him afterwards on Five Live he said that he'd "had to work harder than he would have liked" to which Steve Backley (2 x Olympic Silver Medallist) commented that this was the wrong attitude and that he should have been looking back on a hypothetical gold medal saying "that was easier than I expected".... both of course are incorrect... neither of these are demonstrating Olympic thinking. Despite crashing out in the final of the BMX, Shanaze Reade on the other hand at only 19 years of age, could give either of these medallists a lesson in true Olympism. Coming in to the event as world champion her 'gold or nothing' attitude was rightly justified and with a silver medal in the bank she risked it all to achieve her one and only goal, commenting afterwards that "I put everything in to this and couldn't have given any more" continuing, "I've fallen off and got back up, fallen off and got back up. I gave it my heart and everything"... a true Olympian.

Helen and I are lucky enough to be able to count two other 'true' Olympians as friends and although neither came away from Beijing with a medal they both inspired and motivated me more than I could ever hope to convey in a simple blog. Both gave it their absolute everything... In the women's marathon, having gone through half-way in the lead pack Liz Yelling suffered a terrible fall and ended up running a large part of the race with a broken rib yet still never gave up. You can only play the cards you're dealt in life and to finish so well amongst the greatest distance runners in the world with such a painful injury is the definition of 'Olympic'! Two days later it was Alistair Brownlee's turn in the men's triathlon and just like Liz, Alistair is never interested in just 'making up the numbers'... despite having the odds stacked against him he attacked the greatest triathletes in the world from the start of the race, leading through 5k on the run. Sadly he wasn't able to hold on and his twelfth placed finish, great as it is, does nothing to explain the impact he had on the race... possibly costing pre-race favourite (Javier Gomez) the gold medal by setting such a blistering pace from the start of the run that Gomez was unable to run away from the field.

True personal excellence then is not about talent but rather about desire and hard work... we can all achieve the same levels of these that Al and Liz demonstrate and although unlikely to represent Team GB we too can become Olympians in terms of our personal journeys through life. If I cross the finish line in Lanzarote next May having given it 'my heart and everything' then the result will be irrelevant!

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Two weeks from now I'll be posting my race report from the final A race of the season, the Vitruvian triathlon. If you've read my most recent entries you'll know that my cycling legs have been on holiday recently! Apart from Friday's 6k swim set with H, where I too felt super comfortable all the way through the 10 x 300s, I've had a really easy week and have avoided challenging my legs in any way. Tomorrow and Tuesday will also be relatively easy before Wednesday evening will see a return to the Pool Triangle and a chance to see if the reduced load on my legs combined with the increase in refined sugars in my diet will see me able to produce the kind of power output required to achieve my top 15 goal on the 6th of September.... watch this space ;)

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That's about it for now,

see you in seven,

Tom