Weekend race report – Aerofit 6

Just a quick post from me on what, I guess, must be considered a pretty successful weekend.

Friday was the last of the Aerofit sprint triathlon races and, as I’d only just returned to proper training and had very little biking and almost no high intensity session in the legs, I’d planned to give this one a miss. However, it was the last race of this series and the series is run by our team, so I felt like I should ‘represent’ and, when a slot opened up due to another team member being away, I jumped in a couple of days before.

The race went OK, if not spectacularly. The swim was a bit short (maybe 600m instead of the intended 750m) and a bit shallow, which mixed things up a bit and meant my lead coming out of the water was drastically cut. Still, I came out of T1 first and felt OK – a bit of a relief, to be honest, with how I felt last time still at the forefront of my mind.

Running along the beach before diving back in for the two lap swim.

Pulling a little Bob DeNiro face on my way back into the water.

Diving back in - the swim went around the buoy and not the bloody great tanker, unfortunately.

The winner, Olivier, came through early and very, very fast but I managed to hold off the rest of the field right the way to the end of the bike; even my team mate Ed, who's a hell of a bike rider, didn’t pass me on the bike, which was a little unexpected but I took as a good sign. I got off the 21.5k bike leg in 33 mins (averaging 39+ kph, which included the run in and out of transition) which was pretty decent. Probably as well as I’ve ridden before at this distance, even though I could tell that I was missing quite a bit of bike fitness and wasn't pushing as well as I'd have liked.

The run was a bit of a mess for a number of reasons (newish trainers, miscalculating my goal pace, pretty bad cramping in the last 2km etc) but I ran just over 20mins for the 5k which is in line with what I’ve done before. At the time, I was a bit disappointed with this as I thought my running had improved quite a bit, but now I realise there were a number of extenuating circumstances (lack of training, very little fast running and a lot of slow, long running over the past few weeks). I also realise I’d been expecting a bit too much from myself – I’m pretty sure I’ve never run done a sub 20min (i.e. 4min/km) run in this race before but had gone out gunning for 3.45s or something silly... I should have just been pacing myself to go sub 4s for the first time. Anyway, lesson learned.

Racing out of T2.

Heading out on to the run course.

Looking stronger than I felt.

 My finish time was around my PB (tho the swim was short) and was enough to earn me 3^rd place in the Open Men category – my second podium finish of the year and my first in this series. With the local race scene just about coming to a close, this was a nice way to end the season; especially as this particular race series was the first I ever took part in when I started triathlon a couple of years ago, when my goal was to simply make it into the top half of finishers... When I looked at the guys stood on the podium back then, I never even dreamed that I could be good enough to stand next to them. That I can is something of a victory in my eyes.

Olivier (1), Ed (2) and some other joker.

My first triathlon trophy!