Lisbeth Kristensen’s Blog

We, my little family and I, came to Busselton on Thursday and it was great to be here again as I really like it here. Besides, the IM WA is my favourite race in the world and the organisers, IMG, have been so great and spoilt us with everything. (Big thanks to Dallas, Ken, Shane, Kim and Sarah).
Astrid, our little gorgeous daughter who’s now almost a year old, time flies, got sick on Wednesday and on Friday, she was really bad so that was a bit hard to experience. But luckily she came good and then I started to feel pretty average…saturday morning, I wasn’t able to stand on my legs. After a few apirins and a couple of hours of sleep, I finally managed to get out of bed and go to the race briefing. More aspirins and more sleep got me through the rest of the day and at night, I even started to feel quite good again and I started to believe and hope that I could still have a good race. But I never got to eat and drink as much as I normally do the day before race day.
Sunday morning, the race was off at 6 am. i missed “my” group in the swim and did all of the swim on my own trying to catch the swimmers in front of me which never happened. But I tried to stay positiv and got on my bike. After 40 min. of riding, I started vomitting and I had a hard time eating and drinking and keeping it all inside me for the rest of the ride. Still, I tried not to let all of this affect me. I was loosing time to the race leader and the winner of the race, Gina Ferguson, who had an amazing race, and I was going a lot slower than in 2006 where I set the bike record, eventhough the conditions were quite similar today.
I finished the bike and started running, I tried to stay in a positiv mind set but after 10 min., I had to stop because i felt so sick and I just stood there and vomitted, not a very pretty sight…I felt as if I’d lost all the fluid and the food that I’d been trying to eat and drink all day. I started running again and kept going until I’d done a lap, in case I started to feel better but it never happened so I decided to call it a day. Very dissapointing as I hate to pull out of races but to finish an Ironman the day after being sick just took it’s toll on me.
I would like to thank the organisers again for putting on this beautiful race and for being so fantastic to us. Hopefully i can come back next year and do a lot better.

As you might have noticed, I haven’t done any races for a long time and now I’ll tell you the reason why, I’m pregnant!! It wasn’t really planned but AJ and I are both very excited, but also a little scared. It took me a bit of time to get used to the idea. I actually raced a half ironman and also tried to race IM AZ while I was 6 weeks pregnant without knowing but luckily a very sore back made me unable to run!! I didn’t really enjoy the 2nd and 3rd month of my pregnancy as I spent most of my time either on the couch or in front of the sink being sick!! It was mentally very hard being used to be able to train 30-35 hours a week to suddenly doing absolutely nothing because I felt awful. Things are starting to get a lot better now- I really started to worry that I was going to be bad for 9 months- and I’m back into light training again which makes life a lot more enjoyable. I miss the hard training and the competitons though but my life is not really so much about me at the moment but about looking after the life that’s growing inside of me. As you can imagine, AJ is over the moon and can’t wait to get a little play mate!!

Welcome to my first ever blog!!

I’m now back in Leysin in Switzerland where Team TBB will be based this summer. The weather had been beutiful and very sunny until I got back! Now it’s cold and rainy. It makes me think about the day where I did my first Ironman because the weather was quite similar on that day!

I never thought that I was going to be a professionel triathlete and I never ever in my life thought that I was going to do an IM. I’d watched a couple and I thought that those ironmen and women were crazy people!! Why would anyone run a marathon after a 3.8 km swim and 180km bike? Defenitely not me!

I met my partner, Andrew Johns, at the end of 1999. He had been a professionel triathlete for a while and he was racing and training all over the world. So to be able to see him, I travelled to New Zealand where he was based at the time. I was just going to spend some time with him and to train a little bit. But soon I became a part of Andrew’s training group and when I went back to Denmark after 3 weeks in NZ, I tried to keep training the way I’d just been taught. In the summer of 2000, my new training group all came here to Leysin and I decided to go there as well and to become a “real” memeber of the squad, at least for that summer as I had to start my final studies in Oct.

After a few olympic distances, my coach decided that I should do an IM. Alrigth, I thought, he means for next year but he actually meant for the following month!! I wasn’t happy at all as I never thought I was going to race this mad distance. So we had a bit of a discussion and my coach ended up by saying, you don’t have to do it and from now on, you just decide what kind of races you want to do. I started to have some afterthoughts- I thought that maybe there was a reason why he wanted me to do an IM so I finally gave in. I went to Embrun in France to do this IM and had a great time until my derailleur broke after 90 km of the bike. By then I had a 20min. lead, had to pull out but I thought that racing IM might not be such a bad idea.

So in the following month, I went to Almere in Holland to do an IM. I had a good swim and an awesome bike but I was so scared when I started the run as everyone had been telling me about this wall that I was going to hit after app. 30 km, it just never happened! Off course I got vey tired towards the end but luckily I got spared for that wall! My over all time was 9:08, I had absolutely no idea about times, I was just happy to have finished my first IM! This was the beginning of my long distance triathlon carrier.

I’ve done 10 IM since Almere and they’ve all been a lot harder!! I wish that they could all have been like my first one because when you do your first IM you don’t know what kind of pain to expect. But even with all this pain which for my part always has been towards the end of the rcae, I’m so happy that I discovered this crazy distance!! It really test your limits and besides of all the pain, it also gives you a lot of pleasure!