Right, here goes. I haven’t written a race report for coming to a year now so might be a little bit rusty.
Anyway, due to Covid-19, things have been a little bit different. The training has been going well. Swim training 1:15 for 100mtrs, bike holding 250 watts for an hour & running 3.15Ks (then I hear Coach 2s voice saying “Gra, wake up. You’re dreaming again).
As for the race, we drove up to Winchester early to do a reccie of the bike course as I haven’t done this race before. I was glad that we did as there were a good couple of hills & several narrow roads with grit & gravel on them.
Transition was set up OK, so I hadn’t forgotten how to do that. It was also the first time that I’d had so much space around me & my trusty steed with two bikes per rack (bliss).
I was in the pool at 8:08:20 (to be precise) for a 400mtr swim. The first couple of lengths felt very strange as all of my swimming has been in the sea. It eventually went OK. There was quite a long run into transition & then an even longer to the mount line (due to transition being so big).
I then headed of onto the two lap, 22K bike course. Nothing untoward happened but had a good race with one other guy that kept the bike ride honest up & down the hills. I also didn’t have any problems with the two sets of traffic lights.
Then into T2 where I thought I had dropped the guy I was with on the bike, but he caught me back up about 400mtrs on the run & throughout the run, I just manage to stay within 5mtrs of him but was unable to overtake. The run course was a mixture of road, track & playing field but the running felt OK.
My splits are as follows:
Swim – 7:32
T1 – 1:06
Bike – 44:53
T2 – 0:55
Run – 23:32
Total time – 1:18:00
Overall position 9th out of 214 & officially 2nd in my age group out of 72 (but as the age group was 40+, I found out that the guy who beat me was 12 years younger than me, so I’ll take that as an age group win 😊)
Conclusion – I am so happy to be back racing & with a good result to go with it.