WHY LUCY WILL NEVER GIVE UP
She’ s out of the water and chasing a new dream
When Lucy Strack’s international rowing career came to a heartbreaking end with the petite athlete suddenly unable to complete a single stroke, many would have regarded it as the full stop to her sporting ambitions. Yet four years on, the former international lightweight sculler has been reborn as an Ironman triathlete and is set to compete in the prestigious World Championships in Hawaii next week. It has been an amazing turnaround for the 28-year-old, who has shown remarkable fortitude following her mysterious psychological meltdown on the water. Lucy was totally immersed in rowing from the first time she sat in a boat as a 12-year-old student at St Hilda’s Collegiate in Dunedin. Instantly hooked, she “loved that feeling of gliding on the water at speed” and over time, the strong-willed South Islander embraced the sport’s gruelling training regime. After much success in her later school years, she was picked up by Rowing New Zealand and converted into a lightweight rower.
“Training became absolutely everything to ensure I was ready for competition,” Lucy explains.
She enjoyed a breakthrough year in 2010, winning a silver medal with her rowing partner Julia Edward at the World Under-23 Championships. The following year, Lucy helped qualify her boat for the 2012 London Olympics.
However, her dream run started unravelling when a bad pelvic injury affected her preparations for trials and she missed out on a spot in the New Zealand team. “I had so much pride in qualifying the boat for the Olympics, so it was devastating to miss out,” she explains. “It took a long time to recover from the disappointment.”
At the 2013 World Championships in South Korea, she finished fifth in the lightweight double sculls final, but in early 2014, her body mysteriously started to “shut down”. Inexplicably, Lucy could no longer carry out a full stroke – a movement she had performed millions of times for more than a decade.
The national rowing organisation offered her huge medical and psychological support, but nothing seemed to work.
“Some people called it the yips, although the best way I can describe it is my body and mind were no longer talking to each other. I just couldn’t piece together the stroke.”
After eight months of toil, Lucy quit the sport for good. “I was driving myself insane, so for my sanity, I had to let it go,” she explains. “In the end, it was an absolute relief.”
Racetothetop
For the next two years, Lucy set no major sporting goals, preferring the freedom of recreational running and social sport. Yet something stirred inside the tenacious athlete when a friend suggested she compete in the Tauranga Half Ironman.
An enthusiastic runner – who also burned up thousands of kilometres on the bike as part of her rowing training – Lucy made a sensational Ironman debut in Tauranga and qualified for the 2017 Long Distance Triathlon World Championships in Canada, where she went on to finish fourth in her age group.
“I loved it and decided to undergo a proper programme to see what I could do,” she says. “The training demands are similar to rowing, even though a rowing race is seven minutes long and an Ironman takes more than 10 hours.”
Rising at 5am, Lucy fits in training twice a day around her demanding full-time job as a client account manager at a digital marketing agency. It’s far from easy, but after finishing second in this year’s Ironman NZ in Taupo, Lucy travelled to Cairns in June and placed second at the Ironman Asia-Pacific Championships, which secured her a spot at the World Championships in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
Amazed by what she has accomplished so far in Ironman, Lucy insists the sport – in which she tackles a 3.86km swim, 180km bike ride and 42.2km run – is as much about mental strength as it is physical.
“In a 10-hour Ironman, you can go to some dark places,” she explains. “In Cairns, I heard reports I was fourth and some 22 minutes behind the leader. For just a flicker of a moment, my mind said, ‘You always just miss out. You just missed the Olympic Games and now you are going to miss Kona.’ But I had to pull my head in, turn my race around and throw down a massive marathon.”
Lucy did not miss out this time and will now move on to the World Championships, chasing a podium spot in the 25 to 29-year age group.
So what is it that motivates Lucy to put her body on the line and push herself to the limit?
“The way I left rowing made me quite unsatisfied and I want to prove to myself that I can still be successful, but also prove to others that if you work hard you can achieve anything.”