Coggins finished 33rd at the Tokyo Olympics, the best result for a Hong Kong triathlete, and immediately withdrew from the sport where he had sacrificed so much in pursuit of success.
The 24-year-old, whose family lives in the UK, remained in Hong Kong during the pandemic and missed a series of important events, including having to watch his grandmother's funeral via Zoom link.
“I was left trying to figure out why.'' [I made those sacrifices]Because what did I get out of it? ” Coggins said. “It was part of a huge cloud of emotions…the whole thing was a really crushing experience. The previous 18 months were like the agony of Sisyphea. Every time I started climbing, I fell again. It's gone.
” [Asian Games] I started swimming fine, but I could tell that my body wasn't quite there yet.You start to fall into this downward spiral and I came out of the water in really bad shape. [mental] shape. However, I just didn't have the desire to go through that experience.
“Then I started having a horrible relationship with training. I thought, 'I hate this.' [triathlon], right now'. But I knew it wasn't a triathlon that I hated. I thought I needed to separate sports from the emotions brought on by negative experiences. I realized that the thing that first attracted me to triathlon was still there. ”
Even before the competition, a food poisoning outbreak occurred on the eve of the 2022 Asian Triathlon Championship in Kazakhstan. It came just after he had spent two months with the British national team in Loughborough and “completed every training session perfectly”.
This episode accelerated a demoralizing cycle in which he would train like a demon, only to fall ill with injury or illness during a match. Then, during a World Cup match in Weihai five weeks before the Asian Games, “the most serious injury at the worst time in my career” occurred.
“While running, I tore off about an inch square of skin on the arch of my foot, and by the end half of my white trainers were red from the blood,” he said.
Coggins' frustration with that setback was compounded by the knowledge that he had just come off an impressive training camp in Gran Canaria. At camp in Thailand immediately after the Weihai match, Wright said Coggins “wasn't there at all, physically and mentally.”
Mr Coggins called Mr Wright's comments an “accurate explanation” and said the trip to Thailand was “the straw that broke the camel's back”.
Coggins started seeing a clinical psychologist as the Asian Games approached, but he still hasn't been able to figure out the problem that was causing his repeated bouts of illness.
Central to this was his tendency to not understand the effects of overtraining, both mentally and physically.
“What I've realized now is that overtraining isn't just about intensity,” Coggins says. “If the training is too hard, it might crack after a few weeks, but I always did everything perfectly until the last day.'' What was unfortunate was that there was a lot of external stress. is.”
For Coggins, who is “not a laid-back person,” there was also the anxiety that came with traveling.
There were several sources of stress to contend with, from the difficulty of sleeping on a plane to the simple task of packing, made worse by “out-of-norm behavior and my reactions to some things.”
“We knew there was a problem, but we couldn't ignore it. There was an extra load on us that we couldn't tolerate,” Coggins said. “The expectations I put on myself were too high. I don’t have to prepare for the whole trip, I don’t have to triple- and quadruple-check everything for him.
“You have to pack at the right time. If you pack for three hours and train for three hours, your near-race day will be six hours. To be truly world class, you have to pay attention to every detail. So it's a catch-22 situation. The question is how to reduce stress.”
Coggins almost always fell ill after long flights, countering the benefits of training overseas. He plans to “mostly stay in Hong Kong” in 2024, reacquainting himself with training 25 hours a week before returning to elite competition at the end of the year.
An element of Coggins' burnout stems from his relentless training schedule during the pandemic.
“Training is a means to an end, but during the coronavirus pandemic it has become an end in itself,” Coggins said. “I started looking at my training numbers as if they were the result of a race and became too fixated on them. I'm going to bring a sense of competition to my daily training. What else? Because that didn't happen, it was easy to fall into the mindset that my training goals were my goals for the year.”
After a combination of relentless training, separation from his family, and the setbacks of repeated injuries and illness, Coggins arrived in Hangzhou “not broken, but exhausted and frustrated.”
“The cracks were starting to show,” he says. “I was doing the training I needed, but I just wasn't feeling it. You can't avoid that in triathlon, so it was inevitable that things would start to slip. Physically, I was feeling good. But I wasn't mentally ready. If I hadn't gotten injured in Weihai, I would have been confident of winning a medal.”
Mr Coggins acknowledged it was impossible to “completely avoid anything” regarding missing this year's Paris Olympics.
“It's an ongoing process of coming to terms with the failures I've had and the mistakes I've made, but I'm getting better every day,” he said.
“I still play the sport, I enjoy it, I get excited about racing, so it's paying off to some degree. Spending time thinking about things that didn't happen can lead to miserable results. One of the reasons I'm able to stop letting these things dominate my every waking moment is because I have such high confidence in the future.
“The past few years have not been fun, but something needed to happen for me to take a step back, start from scratch, and get back on my feet.”
Coggins made his comeback with a low-key domestic race on the undercard of the World Triathlon Cup in Hong Kong last month. Although he felt an external curiosity that “I might turn out to be trash,'' the second place result and the internal positive feelings he received as a result made him realize that “this is what I want to do.'' I was convinced of that.
“In the short term, I'm aiming for the national championships next year, and I'd like to win team and relay medals at the 2026 Asian Games,” Coggins said. “I still have a lot of time left, but I'm definitely aiming for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.”
