Ambition - Striving for excellence

Early in my career I have often focused my energy into a specific result goal – like becoming world champion. And even though such a commitment is a tremendous motivator and mental exercise, I have often felt frustrated by focusing on a certain result, since triathlon is so much more than that. A result at a race will always be a measure of your competition rather than yourself. You can win with a poor performance over a bad field or come 5^th with the performance of your life in strong field.

Instead I am focusing my energy in to all those details that constitutes the perfect performance, turning every stone to maximise the effect of training, nutrition, rest, equipment and mental strength. This is more meaningful in order to maximise my potential as well as winning races.

With in the single disciplines of swimming, biking or running you can see athletes with excellent performances, that transcend the boundaries of sport and almost becomes moving art or a powerful visual expression. Seeing Wilson Kipketer running the 800m or Jan Ulrich riding a TT is a study in pure elegance and efficiency.  

As triathletes we can never reach such perfection in a single discipline. To us, the excellent must be defined by the complete combination of swim-bike-run, with no weak spots where everything melts into a whole and the three become one.

In the middledistances of our sports I have come close on a few occasions and my victory in the 2005 Ironman 70.3 California stands out as the one where I made the excellent performance for me. I swam, biked and ran world class and felt a weird satisfaction and fullness after the race, since I could not see anything I could to do better.

I am yet to make a similar performance on the Ironman distance and it is my dream to achieve this in the coming years:

“I feel I have a race in me with a lead pack swim, a record setting bike and a sub 2.50 run. If possible I hope to be pushed to the line and win in a sprint finish, because only then….. I know I have given everything and made the perfect performance”