A triathlete was flooded with memories as she ran the 10km portion at the ITU World Triathlon championships in early September, some 10 months after she had a double mastectomy for breast cancer.
“I thought a lot about it when I was running because I had to go slow,” said 42-year old Kate Armstrong of Okotoks. “That is what pushed me. I had a lot of support from home and I thought about what I had to go through to get there.
“I wasn’t about to give that part up.”
Armstrong had a double mastectomy in November 2018, and through hours of training, plenty of family support and perseverance she was ready for the 1,500m swim, 40km bike ride and 10km run in Laussane, Switzerland on Sept. 1.
However, her goal nearly didn’t take flight when she crashed her bicycle about three minutes from home on Aug. 25 just two days before leaving for Switzerland.
“I wasn’t sure if they would let me fly because of a concussion, but they did,” Armstrong said. “I passed all the cognitive tests and the CT scan showed I didn’t have a brain bleed or anything like that from my head hitting the road.
“I was worried for a while, but I was pretty adamant that I was going to go unless they told me I couldn’t’.”
While the head was fine, the body was sore. Adding injury to injury, she had another bike crash and fell on her hip during a training ride in Switzerland. She was unable to release her right foot, which was clipped into her pedal.
“That really sent me over the edge,” Armstrong said. "I was like: Good Lord, I did not know if I would be able to keep going after that because it really hurt, but It kind of got better.”
Finally, Armstrong was ready to dive into the world triathlon championship on Sept. 1.
“My swim went okay, but it was really windy that day,” Armstrong said. “There were waves, it was one of the hardest swims I have ever done in my triathlons. I would go to breathe and I would look to see that I was still in a straight line – all you could see was this big wave.
“It was definitely a hard swim.”
She faced some foreshadowing when she ran the approximately 500m to the bicycle transition.
“That was when I first realized the run was going to be difficult,” she said. “I was quite sore running to my bike.”
The bike ride went well despite the hills and a sore body.
“I did okay, it was a course that I really liked — it had a hill kind of like Veterans Way, maybe a little bit higher and then you went up another hill,” Armstrong said. “Then you went down these three ‘S’ curves with a hairpin turn at the bottom.”
“I felt like the whole course was quite technical.”
She already knew the run was going to be difficult.
“I had this 10K in front of me and I didn’t’ know what I was going to do,” she said. “I told myself I would walk out of the transition and then I am going to run and then walk and then run, and I’m going to do that the entire 10K.
“I told myself I was going to finish.”
She found out starting from a walk was tough.
“Every time I had to start back up from walking into running it was super difficult,” she said with a chuckle. “In my mind I kind of shuffled it. I ran like a seven-minute per kilometre. Usually I run a 5:25.
“At least I ran it.”
She got some worldly support — triathletes happen to be a friendly bunch. A Brazilian athlete helped pace her up the hill and a triathlete from Mexico helped when she was on a flat portion of the run.
She finished near the bottom of the triathletes at 93 out of 98 in the women’s 40-44 division.
But that didn’t matter.
“When I see the pictures that they sent from the race, I look really painful and not very happy,” Armstrong said. “But I said: ‘I am not going to let them pull me off the course, I want to finish this.
“It took me a long time, but I have been through a lot and I wanted to finish. That has been the goal for year. I just sucked it up and off I went it.”
She’s not done yet.
Armstrong is already qualified for next year’s world championship in Edmonton.
