4:00am. Why is there a nightclub in my room, no its just my alarm (Daft Punk's Around the World, which is somehow just right to wake you up and wake up to) going off at an ungodly hour. Again. Early used to be defined for me as before 6am, but since becoming an athlete (something I still feel hugely gammon saying, for interesting explanation of gammon, see link) I have shifted this definition to before 5am.
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| Hiding my concern pre-race that I'm going to get hypothermia |
My bedroom is directly above my "houseparents" room, so I creep about and get into my Darwin Tri Club two piece suit, which unfortunately no one will actually see as I'll be wearing a jacket over the top for the whole bike and swim (thanks to Frances for this fluro yellow gift, which has been worn pretty much every day since gifting). After a quick bagel and tea (living in the country is great, but limited access to espresso is impacting on my quality of life) I jump in the car for a 1.5 hour drive to St Neots in Cambridgeshire.
Why do damn early, you may ask? I have two bad racing experiences of being late, and so I always try and be plenty early for races. The first was around this time last year when I had a practice tri for Cairns 70.3. In the lead up to the event I had a panic attack in the water on three separate occasions, including on one occasion when I was late and had to rush straight into the water. You can't control much, or everything on race day, but you should control what you can. The other occasion was the BallBuster Duathlon, earlier this year (see earlier blog post).
1500m Swim - 35:15
T1 - 4:03
45km Bike - 1:34:27
T2 - 1:57
10km (actual 9.67km Run - 52:47
Total - 3:08:29 (9th out of 25 Females, Female winner time 2:42:07)
I spent the time I had between racking up and the race starting was spent wondering what the hell I'm doing in the UK (the air temp was 10C, the water temp 12.5C) and thinking about retiring from triathlon until I get back to Australia. I haven't been swimming as regularly as I'd like lately, and I'm sorely lacking in cold water swimming experience, so I wasn't looking forward to the swim. I was also really concerned about being cold on the bike, so generally not looking forward to the whole race.
I've got to work on my pre-race positive talk, because I really enjoyed nearly the whole race. The water was cold, but manageable and not horrible as I'd built it up to. I enjoyed my time in the water, but I'm definitely not comfortable in the sleeved suit. My swim in Hawaii (no suit) isn't going to be fabulous, but it will be good and I'll be comfortable. Two laps of (a possibly long) 750m course in a river.
I pushed hard out on the bike, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to stay without tri bars for Hawaii. I spent most of my time steadily overtaking people, apart from a few blokes who obviously don't swim too well. There was quite a bit of wind on the first 10km of each loop, but thanks to some Norfolk practice I kept pushing through it! Two laps of a 22.5km course.
In the past I've held back on the bike for fear of fading on the run, but even with race nerves and pessimism I know that with all this training under my belt I can sustain a 3 hour effort. My 5km split was 27:05, which is a new PB, and my average pace for the run was 5:27 minutes/km. I know that doesn't sound fast to many people, but I am so happy with how my running is going, especially after pushing on the bike.
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| Post-race shot with some champion cheerers! |
PS- I'd recommend this race series to anyone looking to do a nice community based tri. They ran a super sprint, sprint and OD all together. The marshalls, course and organiser were great. Still not a patch on post-race refreshments of Darwin Tri Club though (only topped by Murray Man 2012 to date!).
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