This being a local race, only 10 minutes from our front door, it had to be done. We registered on the Saturday to save time on Sunday. It may only have been 10mins drive from our front door, but we still had to be up at 3:50am to get to Moyles Court School, where transition & parking was, because Coach 2 was on car park duty. That left me with plenty of time to rack my bike & I was the only one in transition for a good 15 minutes or so, so I picked the best spot. I then went for a little warm up run, headed back to transition to make sure that everything was still OK & as it was a 15min walk to the swim start, I headed off with plenty of time to spare.
Once at the lake I laid out my run shoes for the run back to transition after the swim. The swim was a 400mtr swim. The lake was lovely & warm (20 deg c was being bandied about so it felt like a warm bath). The only issue I had during the swim was when some numpty forced me away from the first buoy, so I had to do a big sprint to get around him to get back on track. Apart from that, the swim went well.
Out of the swim & took my wetsuit off. It had to be put into a transition bag as nothing was to be left outside of the bag otherwise you would get a 2min penalty (the bags would then be transported back to transition once all of the swimmers had left the lake). I put my running shoes on & headed off to T1 which was a mile & a bit away from the lake.
Into T1 for a good transition & then headed off on the bike for a 33K one lap loop. I had a bit of a lonely ride once everything had settled down, although I did have some issues during the ride.
- The first one was horses. At the top of the first climb they had decided to do a road block so I had to take my best TT bike & do some cyclocross with it to get around them.
- The second issue was going across the disused airfield. This time it was cows & horses who were crossing the road so had to slow right down.
- The third issue was about half a mile away from T2. Two people on horseback plus half a dozen New Forest ponies were running amok because they had all spooked each other which was causing chaos.
Into T2 for another quick transition & headed off onto the out & back 5K, mostly off-road run. The only way to describe this run is that it wasn’t an easy run.
You head out of transition & the course is an uphill drag to a stony off road steep climb which flattens out at the top then a big descent down to a road section, then another climb, then you eventually reach the turnaround point, get a drink & do the return leg. All in all it was a very good, testing run course.
My splits are as follows:
Swim – 8:44
T-Run – 8:06
Bike – 57:11
Run – 23:14
Time – 1:37:16
I came 4th overall & 1st in my age group