Catharine Pendrel

Olympics can be magic; they can be heartbreak.  I have had both. This just happened! I have learned a lot from each year of racing mountain bikes, but the heartbreak of underperforming in London at the Olympics probably taught me the most. It taught me how to be true to myself as an athlete and how to find the right ingredients I needed to perform. Preparing for the games in 2012 I let the seriousness of trying to win a medal, and consequently coming up short, steal the joy away from what I was doing. I had to be perfect and anything less wasn’t enough.   That unforgiving mindset gives you no room to come back from adversity or to value a great performance that may be shy of Gold, Silver or Bronze. It means a solid performance can quickly derail into a poor one. I always perform best when I am smiling and embracing the challenge of racing and after London it took a year to find that joy again and another year to turn that into success with a World Championship win. G

The last World cup felt good.   Winning always feels good of course, but it’s more than that, it’s executing what you set out to accomplish.   I sat out nationals to focus on prepping for Rio and had a solid training block that for the first time this season had me confident that I was going to a World Cup healthy and capable of winning.   After a fantastic ride at the La Bresse World Cup where I finished 2 nd after being 1min 40 back mid-race due to problems at the start, I made starts a focus of mine.   Starts have always been my Achilles heel and as such the focus of a lot of training attention.   Having developed a bone infection before Albstadt in my broken thumb (surgical pinning got infected) I was encouraged to train road-only until the eroded bone had strengthened.   This led to a change in how I was going to improve my starts.   I was going to try to do it with mental rehearsal. What blew me away the most was that I literally could not see myself starting fast.