🚑 It’s easy to look at splits on a result sheet and instantly dismiss an athlete as being out of their depth at international level. If you’d crunched the numbers from last weekend’s Asia Triathlon Cup Lianyungang, you could easily have deducted as much from Amara Rae’s vital statistics.
Sure, the Cambridge-based 27-year-old with Kiwi and Canadian roots had produced a Continental Cup best of 7th. But her 2:26:48 effort for the standard distance race at the third tier of global triathlon? More than 12 minutes behind Chinese winner Anqi Huang.
Combined with a heartbreaking DSQ at the recent Oceania Super Sprint Championships on the Gold Coast, it would be easy to write off Rae as just another young triathlete with unrealistic dreams. Heck, even Rae herself admits she often suffers from “imposter syndrome” at big races.
“I spent 10 days in ICU and nearly lost my life…”
What the numbers rarely tell you though is the raw human story behind the faceless stats, nor the sacrifices that come standard for every endurance athlete.
In Rae’s case, it’s remarkable she’s racing triathlon at all. Indeed, she’s lucky to be alive after going into organ failure early last year, the culmination of a long undiagnosed battle with Anemia.
Rae has only been in triathlon since late 2020 after walking away from top level running after developing an eating disorder that “wreaked long term havoc on my body.”
“Even after stepping away from running and eventually entering triathlon, I still had to face the consequence of what I put my body through for quite some time,” Rae told SBR-Tri.com.
“I became incredibly injury prone and had hormones which were a complete mess, something that’s an underrated issue for female athletic performance. This started to clear up towards the end of 2023 for the most part but I hadn’t realised how low my iron levels had gotten over that time.”
Rae’s energy levels were so low she got used to navigating what turned out to be an anemia diagnosis. That came after she fell sick with influenza at the beginning of 2024 when things “quickly went downhill.”
“I was taken to the ICU after going into organ failure as the result of a secondary pneumonia infection in my lungs. I spent 10 days there and nearly lost my life. The doctors told me I had less than 48 hours to live if I hadn’t been admitted when I was,” Rae says.
“I was cared for really well but the trauma to my body was significant and particularly to my lungs. They had a lot of tissue damage and I struggled to breathe for months afterwards. I was told I wouldn’t be back to training properly for about a year if I was lucky…and even though this broke my heart at the time, I dedicated myself to recovering as well as I could.”
That steely determination, coupled with a great support network, saw Rae defy the medics as she was back into proper training within four months. What took longer was dealing with anemia, with the treatment taking until the end of 2024 before “my body felt like it was finally coming back online.”
“There were a lot of times last year where I was ready to stop triathlon,” said Rae who admits things came to a head at European Cup Cork last July when she finished a distant 40th.
“I had a lot of concern I just wouldn’t ever be able to perform like I wanted to after what my body had been through and I remember after racing in Cork, I told myself that would be my last race. I love the sport though and the people in it didn’t let me give up that easy. I’m very grateful for that now.”
Included in that close cohort is Rae’s coach Craig Kirkwood.
“Craig deserves a big shout out. I moved to him in 2023 and he really changed a lot in terms of how I looked at training and pushing myself. Also, my swim coach, Zac Taylor, at St Peters and the squad there has been really beneficial for my big weakness which is my swimming. That still has a long way to go but is making some really positive progressions since starting there earlier in the year.”
So yes, Rae’s triathlon journey is a work in progress. And yes, she gets she’ll go well to race at WTCS level, much less push for Olympic Games selection. But she won’t give up on the dream of being the best version of herself.
That commitment faces its latest test just before lunchtime (NZ time) Saturday when the world No. 228 toes the line in Asia Triathlon Cup Osaka Castle. She’ll then return to Cambridge for a big training clock under the watchful gaze of Kirkwood.
“At this stage I am planning on doing some racing in North America over the New Zealand winter. I’ll see how that goes and take it from there but ideally, I’ll get a good training block in at some point.
“I have been really excited to have some more positive results this year and I really want to keep improving on those. I still have a lot of work to do, that is for sure, but I have been enjoying racing so much more lately and that’s been a game changer so I know it will come eventually.”
Before we look ahead to that positive future, it’s worth rewinding to the Oceania Super Sprint Championships in early May where Rae was on track to make the women’s A final only to be disqualified for failing to see, an ultimately take, a penalty for equipment out of the box in her semifinal.
“Yeah, the DQ in Runaway Bay was a bit of a heartbreaker for me. It’s obviously just racing at the end of the day, but I put a lot into it – time, money, effort, sweat. I think when preventable mistakes like that happen it can initially be really frustrating but then really motivating.
“I often get pretty bad imposter syndrome racing at this level and qualifying definitively for the A final [before the DQ] was a positive nod in the right direction and something I definitely took with me into the race in Lianyugang and I will continue to take into racing I do in the future.”
Last weekend’s result certainly eclipsed her previous experience in China when Rae limped home in 19th (of 22) place with a 41:23 10km split at Taizhou in May 2023. For comparison, she ran a 38:20 last weekend.
It’s nice to be on an upward trend, juggling training with the demands of closing out an honours degree in business studies.
“As for where I wanted to take this, I started triathlon not that long ago and it’s been a huge learning curve for me. From basic stuff like learning how to flip turn in the pool and use clip in shoes on the bike, to learning what it takes to train at the level I need to, it’s been a big journey.
“I’m naturally a very competitive person so I’ll always want to be at the highest level of whatever I do. I want to see just how far I can go with triathlon and how good I can really get. I would love for it to be my job one day and to be at the highest level, but for now it’s just staying really present with where I am and focusing on each race as it comes.”
