Recognizing that marginal gains are real and that they can be prohibitively expensive leads to an important consideration; are they worth it? That is a difficult question to answer.

I even told her that’s not accurate. Surely there is someone who is going to finish in a moment who will bump me down. and then, as we watched, someone did finish…below me in fourth. It began to dawn on me that I had finished THIRD! I quickly scrolled backwards through the results timeline to see how I had come off the bike in 3rd. The man ahead of me in second had blown up on the run and DNF’d. Another guy had passed me but all along, there I was, solidly in third pretty much right through the run. My friend in the Honduras kit WAS in my AG. He had passed me early but I passed him late and he ended in 4th. The whole thing was surreal.

I was absolutely gutted, again. Despite having had a really good day, all I could think about was all the places I could have been one second faster.

Training your nutrition is just as important as everything else you train. Practice with different kinds of nutrition so that you know exactly what works and then you won’t be surprised on race day.