As I have never done this race before, I thought that I’d give it a try.
We had another early 4am start as I wanted to give us plenty of time to get up there. We managed to get there at around 6:30am which gave us plenty of time for prepping the bike, registration, setting up transition, warm up & toilet stop.
The distances were a bit strange in that it was a 1K swim, 35K bike & a 7.5K run.
It was a boiling hot day, even at 8am, but I don’t mind it when it is warm 😊.
The swim was a two lap lake swim but we were still doing individual rolling starts because of Covid, but a different way of starting as we had to sit on the pontoon & lower ourselves into the water before starting our race but because the Race Organisers didn’t let us have a warm up swim beforehand, it still took my wimpy body a little bit of time to acclimatise to the water temperature.
The first lap was OK but where I started within the first 10, by the time I started my second lap most people were now in the water & I had to do some dodging & weaving to complete the second lap.
I was a little bit wobbly on exiting the water where I then had a 200mtr run to transition up a little grassy hill, then exit transition back down the grassy hill.
Onto the two lap bike course which consisted of a little bit of fast main road, turning off onto quite a lumpy middle bit of the course & the final bit of the lap was down quite a twisty country lane so I had to be careful. Then I got overtaken by a Spanish guy in the first lap with the name of Gomez (ummm, I thought that he was supposed to be in Tokyo!!!). Anyway, the second lap was a bit of a battle with some guy who liked to push a monster gear on the flat, so I struggled to keep up with him there but when it came to the lumpy stuff, I was in my element & made some time on him into T2.
Exit T2 & onto the two lap run course, but not having done this race before, I wasn’t too sure what the run course was like, but once I got on it it was not to my liking as it was all off-road around the perimeter of the lake. It was bumpy, uneven, grassy, hard compacted tracks & tree roots everywhere, but I muddled my way through this & just knuckled down & got on with it but just very slowly, even though I was constantly being overtaken which doesn’t make me happy ☹
Because it was so hot by the time I finished the race, my post-race cool down this time was a 10min dip in the lake (highly recommended)
My splits are as follows: Swim – 16:46; T1 – 0:48; Bike – 55:34; T2 – 0:51; Run – 33:27; Total time – 1:47:28
Overall position – 23rd out of 135 & 2nd in my age group.