The Junior worlds team travelled to Frankfurt Oder Germany in August 2019.
After having a tough start to the year due to my elbow injury I had made it my one and only goal to get back onto that top performance standard in order to step up and perform to my best ability at this competition.
Our team qualified second with a time of 4.29.9 which wasn't too far off the Italians which gave us motivation to push through our potential and make it to the final spot for the gold ride off.
In the first ride off we raced against Russia and had a good ride and produced a similar time as qualifying which was 4.28.7. This was not the best ride for me as I was struggling with terrible stomach pains that caused me periods of agony at certain stages however I knew that my role in the team was more important and that they needed me as much as I needed them to pull through. However the team agreed that we could go faster trusting the processes that our coaches had trained us to do and also engaging in the correct mindset which helped us the whole way through.
The final will forever make everyone in this teams heart drop every time it is mentioned we raced our hearts out and left everything on the track. to this day I truely believe that there is no way we could have ridden any better as we were all barely hanging on at the end. We produced a time of 4.26.067 and Italy was 4.26.060. although this was a pb for us and 5 seconds faster than we produced the year before we could not help but be completely distraught knowing how close we were. We all had ideas of what we could've done to win which unknowingly made us feel worse about our performance which meant our perception of the race was very negative.
When something like this happens it is so hard to look at the positives however I have spent a long time working on this personally and now my view on this event is that i am grateful to 1. have been able to ride with the team 2. to make it to the gold final 3. to make it to the start line.
There are so many more however being grateful for the most simple things can make a massive difference to the outlook of an event such as this.
