World championship

Saskia is a doctor, an elite HYROX athlete, and a former international runner with a 16:02 5K PB, despite running less than 20 kilometers per week in training.

She was the fastest female in the age groups at the 2026 HYROX World Championships, and in this chat we discuss how she balances working in medicine with competing at the highest level, and how HYROX training has helped improve her running fitness.

Saskia also talks openly about her history of injuries and under-fueling, her impressive doubles partnership with former Rocks Life podcast guest, Holly Archer, the penalties that have cost them in previous races, passing out during the lunges in Berlin, and her ambitions in the sport.

It was a great chat with a super impressive, exciting athlete, and I think you'll really enjoy it.

I'll still follow along and cheer on the underdogs because that Mickey-Minnie combo has to do something good, right? And so I think that overall we'll still enjoy it, but I do think that we just got to give it another season because this is the second Worlds that we've had, right? So maybe we're just being a little bit more eager to see the success that we all want, but maybe it's just not as plausible considering it's only been the second one.

I think my initial reaction to it was, oh, that's surprisingly late.

On the flip side, I think Connor made a very good point there where I think Ravensburger might have been kind of hedging their bets a little bit with Rotation Part 2, seeing how Rotation Part 1 created this very limited metagame, and they didn't want to necessarily have the culmination of the competitive game season be on a five set metagame just in case it was bad and limited uh or bad in terms of like the scope or the diversity in it but i think you know in hindsight 2020 they would have been probably just fine having a world's world championships in attack of the vine but i think letting hyperia city rotate in and having a little bit of opportunity to see how that set impacts the larger metagame is is helpful and then obviously we'll see worlds that will happen and hopefully there's going to be some sort of like special format they have with that or maybe they're just going to do limited which i think is a great option because i think the current set for limited is very well manicured and very well tailored to be a quality limited experience, which I've seen leaps and bounds of improvements in that regard from Whispers into starting with Whispers and Winterspell and Wilds and now Attack of the Vine have all been fantastic limited sets.

in that regard, just like very quality cards, quality balance there.

So we'll see what it looks like.

So tell us about what's coming up.

So we've got nationals coming up in a few weeks at the start of October, and then we go for our world's run-through camp in the Gold Coast, and then, because I've been selected to go to the World Championships in December in South Africa, and then we go to South Africa in November to December.

So, big lead-up.

There's a lot going on for the Blackfins.

Okay, great.

Good to have.

Just in some other sports news as well, Lance, the Formula One have announced that they're going to increase the number of sprint races from six to ten for the next World Championships.

The shorter race on a Saturday, of course.

was a lot of the champs.

It was like the favorite winning like 90% of races, you know, if you think about it, which is actually really rare for a world championships.

And I wonder if that has anything to do with the smaller fields and less heats, you know?

Yeah.

But I didn't like how long the name was.

And eventually I just grabbed it.

And after the 2022 World Championships, my world changed after that.

I was like, wow, this is an amazing sport.

There's still the tail end of the 2026 road racing season and a big race is still to come.

I mean, the World Championships is on the horizon in 10 days or so.

over there in Canada and in this episode Graham we're going to talk about those two Canadian races very much the dress rehearsal for the world championships it's going to be a Taddei Pogacar free world championship so that adds an interesting dimension we'll talk about that in the middle part

Indeed.

So from the Hammonometro to maple syrup and poutine, perhaps.

What have we learned from the two races that most of the riders who will be competing for the Rainbow Bands have used as part of their preparation this past weekend?

Well, I think Isaac Del Toro is the new men's road race world champion in waiting.

No, after his performance at the Grand Prix Montreal, which was held on the same circuit, more or less, as the world championships.

So, as you might have guessed then, because this is a specialist episode, we don't have any of our usual features.

Now, I know that might cause a lot of people to switch off, but yeah, we don't have any listener mail, we don't have weekly drone, any of that stuff, but genuinely, this is the first opportunity I've had to speak to you after the World Championships.

Now, we had our World Championship wrap-up pod, we've had our two on-the-ground reports at this stage, plus we've had our episode 500 of Piping Live, Wow, what a show that was.

We haven't really had an opportunity to discuss that, have we? But we will, because on next week's Big Rap Show podcast, we're going to be catching up on everything.

But if you're involved in tattoos elsewhere across the globe, then please do get in touch with us.

Tell us about your experience of playing at some of these huge events.

What's it like to walk out there in those huge lights with all of those eyes looking at you? It's bound to be a different buzz from stepping out on the line at the World Championships.

But still just as thrilling, I would argue.

This is The Feed Zone.

MUSIC yes everybody welcome to the feed zone from cycling legends and we're also going to be talking about not just the Vuelta but we're going to talk about transfers we're going to talk about people retiring we're going to talk about sydney sweeney oh my goodness um but uh what else we're going to look at montreal the racing in canada what does that tell us about what we could expect at the world championships in a couple of weeks time but i can't do all of that myself and i'm joined as ever from flint michigan with david stanley evening

david hello gary hello chris and as they used to say all the ships at sea

All the ships at sea.

Google Meet is telling me we've got 15 minutes left, guys.

Let's move on.

World Championships.

Yeah.

Yeah.

world champs course without looking like mountains so then therefore it's it is quite good for me let's say because you know other than next year which is a mountain world champs let's call it there's three years that i won't do a world championships because it's belgium denmark uae So it's kind of like there's 26, 27 and there's almost like a three-year hiatus where most likely I won't do world championships and there'll be a different group of young Aussies that come in, I would say, for that period of time.

But no, watching the last week in Canada was like this is, I think this would be a pretty cool race.

Yeah, and like Hayman was talking about, like to pull on that Australian jersey.

Let's say that there was no connection with it.

There was no, for me, there was no pride.

It was cool pulling on the Aussie jersey, but I didn't get that pride and that feeling that other guys, the elite guys were talking about when they got to wear the green and gold at World Champs of like, how cool is this? It didn't move the needle for me.

I feel like it's changed.