Lucy Charles-Barclay feeling fresh and ready to race
Reigning 70.3 world champion Lucy Charles-Barclay opens up on her prep for the race in St George and talks about how she's feeling after a challenging year
Lucy Charles-Barclay has been speaking ahead of the 2022 Ironman 70.3 World Championship and admits she’s feeling fresher than she would ordinarily.
The British star missed much of the season through injury, but returned in style in August, winning the World Triathlon Long Distance Championship.
She followed that up with a silver at the PTO US Open and then took her fourth second-place finish at the Ironman World Championship in Kona.
Now, just a few weeks later she’s about to line up on the start line in St George, Utah, to defend her Ironman 70.3 World Championship.
Feeling fresh
Speaking about the year and her build up to Friday in the pre-race press conference, she said: “I think in general it’s been a very different year. This will only be my fourth race of the year and normally I’d have raced a lot more by this point.
“I feel fresher than I normally would. We always knew that if I was going to race her after Kona I kinda needed to finish Kona, put that behind me and then focus fully on this race and I feel like we’ve done that really well mentally.
“And, actually, my body seems to have kept up, too, and it’s feeling pretty fresh, so yeah, I’m pretty happy with that.”
Her prep hasn’t been all plain sailing, though, with poor weather scuppering a few plans while she was in the mountains. “We’ve been up the mountain and we had a big snowstorm,” she explained. “I had a brand new wetsuit that needed breaking in and we couldn’t actually get down the mountain, so kinda playing around in the snow with my wetsuit was the best option.”
She added: “I feel like I’ve acclimatised quite well to the colder weather,” she said.
Is history going to repeat itself?
Charles-Barclay also took the time to reflect on her experiences in St George last year, when she won her first world title.
“Last year was just an epic day. Everything went to plan and it was definitely the best I’ve felt over the distance,” she said. “Just taking that tape was an amazing moment. Obviously it was the first time I’d got a world title and I felt I’d come so close over the Ironman distance, so to do it on the 70.3 was amazing.
“There was a lot of emotion there and just coming back to St George, walking around the town, I got the memories from last year.
“If I can do anything close to last year’s performance then I’ll be over the moon.”
Want to watch all the racing unfold this weekend? Here’s how to watch the Ironman 70.3 World Championship live.
Watch the pre-race press conference in full
Top image credit: Patrick McDermott/NHLI via Getty Images
Rob Slade
