Race: Athy, IrelandDistance: Olympic (1.5k/40k/10k)
Attendance: 700 registrations – about 600 finishers.
Course: Mostly flat.
Cycle course: 20K of the course is on 3rd class roads, narrow and at times dangerous (too close to other cyclists). Rolling hills.
Run course: bad running surface all the way. Very narrow path and mostly on uneven grass.
Weather: Cloudy
Air Temperature: 15 degrees (at 12:00).
Water Temperature: 14 degrees.
Nutrition:
Pre-swim: 350ml high5
Cycle: 550ml high5 + half a powerbar.
Run: 2 high5 gels.
Pre-raceRegistration at 8:00 (woke up at 6:00).
Today, I wasn’t in the mood for racing. The entire week has been like a rollercoaster of emotions as it was my last week at Unilever.
I haven’t been myself for a while and together with my hamstring injury in April, it has impacted on my training regime.
Also I haven’t really trained for this distance, so today’s goal was to get some fun back in my training more than anything.
But unfortunately before the race started, I wasn’t really switched on and didn’t really fancy doing anything at all. I don’t think I’ve ever been so less interested in racing in my life (at any sports).
At some point I even thought about going home.
The positive note was to see Martin Collier in Transition. This man knows his stuff. We had a very interesting conversation about bikes and nutrition which cleared my head somehow.
Swim:1.5k – 22m18s – 1st out of my wave – 22nd overall fastest swim
I was in wave 7 (80 athletes) so this meant I wouldn’t race until 11:10. A long wait but something is normal in such big races.
The swim was based in a river (600m upstream and 900 downstream)
Today there weren’t any currents so it worked on my favour as I didn’t want poor swimmers to get the benefits of those 300m extra of downstream. According to my watch, I maintained the same speed in both (up & down) so this confirms the current being neutral.
I was one of the last to get into the water (as usual) to make sure I didn’t spend much time in cold water.
I stopped right before the ramp and I thought to myself “I don’t want to do this shit”. I was still not switched on and there were only 3mins to go.
I got in and the water temperature (14d) felt great. I thought it’d be much cooler. I did my usual 2x50m sprints to raise my heart rate up and get the feel for the water.
I place myself at the front to the left as usual (I breathe on my right, so this allows me to see other fast swimmers).
Race started. I went flat-out for about 200m and I found myself leading the pack. So far, nothing new. I started slowing down to get back to my 1.5k race pace and get in control of my breathing.
I didn’t feel any current but I still made sure I swam close to the river bank to avoid any extra dragging. Unfortunately, there were a lot of weeds and I felt they were slowing me down, so I went back to the centre of the river where I stayed up to the turnaround point.
I turned and I saw two swimmers drafting off my feet. The rest of the pack seemed quite far away. I sped down and lost those swimmers.
I kept swimming very close to the mid rope to avoid having to lift my head up too much to sight (ropes were position on a straight line).
I was first out of the water on my wave in 22mins18sec… I guess it’s an ok time, taking into consideration that I only swim once a week.
Transition 1:Quite slow. 1m31s (155th time).
Cycle:40k – 1h03m28s – 37.7Km/h – 18th overall fastest bike split
I hammered the first kilometres down aiming to get the 4 lads that had overtaken me in transition.
The first few 7kms of the course are on good 2nd class roads with a slight incline the whole way.
I overtook 3 of those cyclists within the first 4kms but the 4th one was a bad-ass cyclist. Eventually I caught up with him on the 5th km. My legs started to hurt quite a bit and then I realized I was doing an average of 41km/h (too fast for me).
We both settled on a good 39km/h pace which I sustained until we turned left at km 7 where we found a really crappy 3rd-class road.
It was a very narrow road with a pretty bad surface. It was also very hard to overtake cyclists at that point as the width of the road must’ve been about 3 meters (we had cyclists cycling in both directions).
My average went down to 36km/h and I almost hit a couple of cyclists as I was overtaking (some people can’t cycle on a straight line). At km 15 things changed and the road opened up a bit so it became easier to overtake and sight ahead.
The next 10kms were on a mixed of road surfaces with five or six 90degree turns which I personally managed very bad and I ended up cycling on grass a couple of times and avoided a ditch by millimetres.
Back on the main road again - 13km to go and the average was around the 37.4km/h mark.
Two more cyclists had caught up with us so it was now four of us working at similar speeds.
We always kept the 10m non-drafting rule and also cycled in a “Z” shape to avoid any possible misinterpretations.
Unfortunately, one of these guys kept drafting off us. He practically stayed the entire course behind one of us and tried to block the rest when/if you wanted to overtake him. – He was an idiot whom I’m still trying to figure out his name of the finishers list – he had a Base 2 Race tri-suit on.
I shouted at him several times to stay left and stop drafting which he didn’t appreciate. He also cycled over one slow cyclist after the dismount line. I’m still wondering what the role of the marshals was at that point of the race.
Note: the lack of drafting marshals on the road is appalling and TriAthy should do something about it in future events. (In the other hand, I must say this prick was the only one I caught drafting)
The three of us kept the pace up and I finished the bike split with a comfortable but steady speed (37.7K/h). I slowed down in the last 2kms to keep the legs “fresh” for the run.
Transition 2: A slow but okish transition. 1m13s (90th time – 4s faster would’ve put me in the top 40 so it’s not really a big thing).
Run:10k – 43m24s – 4:21pace– 103rd overall fastest run split (really poor)
The run is based on a very crappy surface – mostly on an uneven grass path. The path is very narrow so it is quite difficult to overtake other runners.
I ran the first 2 Kms at my 10k pace (4:07 – 4:10) but then I suddenly felt into a more comfortable pace of 4:20plus which I maintained up to 9th km… As usual, I finished a bit stronger and I clocked a 4:05 in the last km but nothing out this world. I knew that I had to push a bit harder all the way but I just didn’t do it.
I was a bit disappointed with my really poor running performance but in the other hand, I knew that I haven’t really trained for this distance so the race-pace I did was more similar to my half iron distance.
Overall
Quite happy with my swim and bike performance but I really need to put extra work on my run.
