When Lionel and Roger Penrose created the Penrose Staircase
in the late 1950s, finding its parallels with how we feel during many of life’s
challenges was certainly not their intended purpose. However, the optical
illusion provided by this impossible object, is exactly what springs to mind
when I view the journey of an Elite athlete.
Visually, the Penrose staircase presents a staircase with
four 90 degree corners. The stairs form a continuous loop. In effect therefore,
you can continually climb the stairs only to appear right back at the
beginning. But it’s important to remember that the Penrose staircase is just an
optical illusion, it’s an impossible object. In reality, progress is
made, times do come down, and athlete evolution does take place.
But in stepping up to racing the best girls in the sport, sometimes this
progress can be disguised, masked, and lost amidst expectations and perceptions
that too are evolving. It can seem like you’ve climbed so many stairs, only to
be starring once again at that optical illusion, feeling like you’re simply
right back at the beginning again…. But of course you’re not.
This recent Australian summer was only my second off season as a triathlete
and certainly my first covering as many miles as I did, and working as hard as
I did. Honestly, almost every day started with the same irrational fear that I
might not make it through the day, and then almost every day would end with the
same sense of disbelief – did I really just survive that?! As far as likening
this experience to a staircase, well I felt like I’d basically spent 10 weeks
climbing all 163 floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. And so, eager to start
the season and allow myself the rewards of all this hard work, to apply all
those personal best training sessions to a competitive environment, I went to
New Zealand for my first ITU race of the season. And it was a total debacle. I
was devastated and I truly felt that I had fallen victim to a Penrose
staircase. I had climbed, I had endured, I had surprised myself day in and day
out with my performances at training, to only end up right back at the
beginning. In effect, that’s honestly exactly what it felt like. In reality,
that was a ridiculous conclusion to come to. One race does not erase all the
personal best times in the pool and on the bike. It doesn’t deem the
competitive results at local events, against Olympic and World Championship athletes,
irrelevant. Especially when on watching footage, it’s quite embarrassingly obvious
that there were some serious navigational issues in the swim which contributed to
the debacle (including, at one point, swimming frantically in the opposite
direction to that which the rest of the field were heading). Once I stepped back,
and saw the failure for what it was - an optical illusion - only then was I ready to
move on.
The very next week, with some extra fire in my belly and
something to prove, I went to the Caloundra Gatorade triathlon. Despite the
local nature of the race, it was very much an international level field,
highlighted by the Commonwealth Games silver medallist no less. There too were
no less than seven girls who’d raced World Cup level. It was the perfect low
profile, but competitive environment in which to truly file the previous
weekend away as an aberration. I came out of the water within a stone’s throw
of girls that had decimated me a week earlier. I could have stopped right
there. I’d just shown myself that I had improved over the summer. The
hours in the chlorine had made a difference. This was no Penrose
staircase. Compared to my first off season, I had climbed to a higher
level. I finished the race in 5th, with a run split only 6 seconds
shy of that run by first and second. The race had served its purpose and it was a relief.
And so I was beginning to see through the optical illusion.
I was starting to see that the Penrose staircase was penetrable. And lucky
that, as the Oceania Elite Olympic Distance Championships loomed not quite a
fortnight later. As is fast becoming a pattern, the fields this year are a
whole lot stronger compared with last year as Olympic qualification points are
up for grabs. There’s a clear desperation this year, with even Olympic
medallists racing wherever they have to, just to get the points they need. Devonport
was no exception, especially with the double points on offer from it being a
Continental Championship. The composition of the field coupled with it being
Olympic Distance (1500m swim) had the potential to leave me very exposed, and
potentially in for a pretty rough day. I knew this going in though and I was
prepared for it. The relief and excitement then when I managed to pull out my
best swim ever, providing me the opportunity to not just time trial my way back
into the race but actually work with a pack from almost the very beginning of
the bike. As someone used to bridging on the bike and running through the field
for my results, this was a huge step in the right direction for me. I surpassed
my expectation in finishing 13th, and within the all-important 8% threshold
to take home a valuable parcel of ITU ranking points. There is a long year
ahead and this is only month one of ten on the road, racing. There is a lot of
work yet to be done but what Devonport represented for me, was progress. It proved
myself wrong to think that I’d gone forward over summer, to simply only arrive
back at the beginning. And it proved my coach right, that I just need to
trust the process and keep at it.
Elite sport isn’t
easy. It can, at times, feel like ten steps forward, twelve steps backward. But
no hard work goes unrewarded at the end of the day. Additionally, even a bad
day can provide its own form of progress. It may feel like we’re continually
stuck in a loop, continually climbing a Penrose staircase, but that’s only because
we’re athletes. By nature, we’re irrationally negative on the slightest hint of
a bad race, or a bad session. But get over that, see the bigger picture and
suddenly, you’re starring down the staircase, way down, at where you actually,
truly, once were.
