Race Coverage

The Mother of All Races...

Friday, 22 September 2017 23:10

By Laura Knoblach (decagirlblog.wordpress.com)

Swiss Deca Race Report - This March, I was peer-pressured into signing up for the race of my life by some of my very best friends: Shanda Hill and Joey Lichter. They promised that if I didn’t, I’d be sitting at home the entire month of August, wishing I were with them. They were right…

Still, it took their convincing, along with my world turning upside down, for me to finally commit to doing the Swiss Deca. 

For those unfamiliar with ultra triathlons, a Deca is a 10x ironman-distance race. There are two formats: the “one-per-day” and the “continuous.” In the former, an athlete races one ironman-distance triathlon per day for ten days. The later consists of a 24-mile swim, 1,120-mile bike ride, and 262-mile run with a 14 day cutoff. 

We all chose the later. 

While most onlookers would call it crazy, the thought of doing this race (and training for it) became my sanity. I’d spent several years working through abuse that had happened to me as a child and teenager, when a I was raped by a close friend in the fall of 2016. The experience landed me in a hospital bed in late January, as I worked through the aftermath of what had happened. ...

It was events like this which led me to ultra racing in the first place, and I think it took the mother of all races to pull me out of the dark hole I fell into after last fall and winter. Training forced me to wake up and cycle (or run, or swim…), even when it seemed like a monumental feat just to get out of bed in the morning. I am grateful and glad, on so many levels, that I had the opportunity to be there in the first place.  READ MORE