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Rob Watson, our man in Moscow – Day 8: sticking to the race plan

Hi Canada, hope you’re having a great weekend. Wanna hear a little more about what’s going on over here in Cow City? Let’s do it.

Another day at the track and another stellar Canadian performance. Team captain Angela Whyte was amazing in scoring a 6th place finish for the good ole’ Red & White over them 100m Hurdles. Now, I may seem like a broken record here, but Angela is a super rad girl, so happy for her. She has had a brilliant season. There is a theme to my posts: Canadian athlete kicks ass, then I proceed to gush about how much I love them and how rad they are. What can I say folks? Just reporting the truth. This is a team full of absolute beauties!

Angela is one of my favourites though. I first met her in Berlin in ’09. She was a gem back then and hasn’t changed a bit since. I hadn’t seen Angela for four years, but when we met up at training camp this year the first thing she did was make fun of me for how drunk and silly I got at the ’09 post Worlds banquet (this was 26-year old Rob and there was free beer — of course I got after it!) Anyways, such a nice lady, and quite the jokester. I like her.

Hey, so I finally got to race yesterday! It was friggen fun man. I came 20th. I’m pretty happy. I will put up a full race report on my personal blog, because I’m sure y’all don’t wanna hear me ramble on and on and on about the race. But if ya do head over to Leblog that’s what you’re gonna get — it’s gonna be a tedious read. Good luck to all those whom venture over there.

I’ll give a just give a quick breakdown for y’all: First off, gotta shout out to my coach/brother Pete for putting together a great training plan. Good job coach! There were many a time I’d look at the assigned workout and curse coach Watson for his cold-heartedness, but boy , was I happy that I did all that silly work at around 35K yesterday! Thanks to the Vancouver kids and Rich Lee back home for helping me get through some tough training (Kelly, Dylan & Gym Rat Todd — beauts!) and thanks so much to the Athletics Canada team here for helping me prepare over the past couple weeks in Kaman and the Cow.

Pre-race we studied past results, analyzed weather data and basically left no stone unturned. We knew that there was gonna be a big pack up front (there was), we knew that this pack would blow up and many a man would drop out or just blow the eff up (they did), and we knew the hot weather could either destroy you (out fast, overheat, die) or help ya out (conservative pacing, usage of cooling techniques and running down the dead). I was confident with my plan come race day. I was ranked 48th in the race, but we believed that top 20 was achievable if we executed properly. The execution part was all on me. Sounds simple, but if ya know me, then ya know that I am not always the smartest of racers. Thankfully though, I was finally able to stick to a plan and, I’ll be damned, it all worked! Man, that was a very tough race, but totally worth the suffering! Good job team!

After the race I executed another plan — and like the race I was equally satisfied with the results:

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Alright, gonna go dilly-dally around a bit before heading over for the last session of the Champs. We have Nate in the 1500m final and the 4x100m boys rolling tonight!

Thanks for the support and kind words, you guys rock.

Be good.

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