I raced the new 70.3 in Pula on the weekend, and thought I'd report back here.

This race turned out to be rather notable, with the swim being voided due to the buoys breaking free of their anchors and drifting away during the rolling start.

So here goes (long post ahead):

Getting there
I got to Pula (from London) by flying into Venice on the Friday night, staying at an airport hotel there (found a nice one actually!) and then driving a rent-a-car 3 hours to Pula the following morning. It was an easy drive, the vast majority of it on very smooth 'choose your own speed limit' kind of highway.

We checked into an airbnb in Pula, and that was simple as can be. There seemed to be a lot of good, cheap airbnb options.

Registration/briefing etc
This was split into a couple of areas. Registration and T2 were set up near the Arena (the big roman amphitheatre where the finish line is). The swim start, T1, and the race briefing were at a resort area called Verudela. It would have been nicer if they were all together in one place, because it meant you had to go back and forth a bit on the day before the race. This was ok because we had a car (and it was 10mins drive, maximum), but waiting for the shuttles that ran between them would have been a bit of a PITA.

Race morning
Rolling start beginning at 10am, transition opened at 8am. I hate early starts, so this was great. Athletes were able to park at Verudela, and there seemed to be enough parking. Again, I can't comment on the shuttles pre-race. Transition was very relaxed, plenty of bathrooms, water, etc available. There was a guy walking around all kitted up ready to race, playing a ukelele. He looked about as chilled out as I felt.

The walk down to the swim start was short enough, but it was narrow, so if you wanted to be near the front, you actually had to get there a bit earlier. I'm not much of a swimmer so was happy to jump into the water whenever, so not a problem really.

The swim
So once you get down to the beach, you cross the timing mat, dive into the water and you're off. No in-water warm up, but this didn't bother me. The first thing I noticed was just how magnificent the water was. Nice temperature, very clear with excellent visibility. When it got deep enough that you couldn't see the bottom, it was a beautiful shade of blue. Really nice.

The swim ended up being voided because some of the buoys broke free of their moorings and drifted off. Hard to comment on that without having a helicopter view of the whole thing, so I'll just give my experience:

Although the water was fantastic, sighting was really, really difficult. The buoys were very far apart, and weren't that big. Maybe 2m high. In an ocean swim, this was really hard to see off in the distance. So I was basically following the swimmers around me.

Here's a map of the swim course (I'd be surprised if there were as many buoys as indicated on the map!):



As you can see the course is out-across-back. Despite not being entirely sure if I was going in a straight line (swimmers were everywhere to my left and right) I completed the 'out' section and turned left with no real dramas. Then I swam the 'across' section and turned left with all the swimmers around me. This is where things started to get weird.

After a minute or two on the 'back' section, I had a look around. There were swimmers over 100m to my left, and 100m to my right. I looked up, and couldn't really make out the line of buoys I was supposed to be keeping on my left. The water was moving up and down, not so much that it affected the swimming, but enough to make visibility difficult. So I just kept swimming in what I felt was roughly the centre of the widely dispersed group of swimmers and hoping for the best. I began to see the fairly distinctive building on the beach near the swim start (see pic below) and started using it as a sight-marker, along with a lot of the people I was swimming with:



I only realised something was really wrong when I put my head up to look ahead and saw some swimmers stopped in the water, shouting and pointing behind me and to the right. I looked back and there was a buoy that was MILES away. I thought "Oh shit, did all these people around me and I turn the corner too early? Was that buoy where we were supposed to turn back? But that's so far away, that can't be right...

Then, I realised something else. Me and what appeared seemed to be about half the other swimmers hadn't actually been swimming back toward the transition, but towards a similar looking building on the coastline! Here's a photo, looking FROM the swim start/finish toward the building that we were swimming to. Compare it to the building in the previous pic and you can see how people got confused, in moving seas on a poorly marked course, with moving buoys.



I looked over to my right and saw the other half of the swimmers heading toward the transition. At this point I was very confused (but still calm and safe, mind you) so I just swam over to them and went back into transition.

Except for the 'out' section of the swim, I have absolutely no idea if I swam the course correctly. I don't have a GPS swim watch so I'm not sure if I swam too far or took a shortcut, or a bit of both! It was really chaos. Before they pulled the swim times down from the website, a relative following my race online saw that I swam a 36min split. I did 35min at Zell Am See three weeks ago, but tend to be quicker in ocean swims (I think the extra buoyancy makes a big difference for me). Make of that what you will.

T1
Apart from a steep uphill run to get to T1, transition was ok. It was a VERY crowded change tent, but I didn't spend much time in there. Wetsuit off, helmet and sunnies on, and then outta there. It took me 3mins to get through.

The ride
Take a look at the ride profile, and you can see that the road climbs for the first 58k, then drops downwards pretty quickly. So it was always going to be a slower first two-thirds.

But this was compounded by some BRUTAL headwinds on the way out. Massive, constant, straight in the face headwinds, while going uphill. It was a bit of a slog, and made finding a rhythm really hard. I started behind a lot of athletes and was mostly moving up through the field. I saw some big groups all together, probably because anytime someone tried to pass, they'd get exposed to the wind, pushing them straight back into the people they'd just gone past.

Then, when you got to the top of the hill, it was time to fly. The last 30k or so was either downhill or dead flat, with roads that were straight enough to keep the speed up. It was a really fun section, and riders with technical skill had a slight advantage here.

As for the road quality, I thought it was just fine. There were a couple of sections of speed humps where you needed to take care (make sure nothing is loose!), but these were well marked. Not everyone was happy with the roads though. After the race I heard a few Germans and Austrians say that the roads were atrocious and unacceptable, but the Brits said they were nice and smooth. I'd say that tells the story - not autobahn quality but really nothing wrong with it at all. I didn't see a single person stopped with a puncture on course.

I'm not very experienced, but it seems like this bike course is middle-difficulty, and not a course to go to if you're chasing a PB. But the headwinds on the day made things really difficult and generally slow. I think the fastest (non-relay) bike leg was a 2:25, and although there were no pros in the race you would expect to see quicker than that. By the way, my Garmin 810 said the course was 89.8km and that I did it in 2:34, but the official time-sheets online indicate that the course was 92.2km and that I did a 2:38. I have no idea why the discrepancy exists.

T2
T2 was a breeze. Straight in and out. DIY bike racking. Plenty of room in the tent.

The run
The run was a fairly simple 3-and-a-half loop course. It goes through the old part of Pula and on the coast road. There were three aid stations, with a longer gap between the last and first of each loop. So it would have been nice to put one just after T2 (you had to run half a loop to get there after the bike). No particularly noticeable hills on the course. Great course for spectators, plenty of spots to stand, and if you wanted to run back and forth between spectator points to see your friends or relatives run you could see them go by 7-8 times without much difficulty. Aid stations got a little crowded later on, particularly when some athletes stopped there for a minute or two of breather. But aid stations are always a bit chaotic I suppose.

The finish was in the roman amphitheatre, and was a good laugh. They had guys dressed up as roman gladiators standing either side of the chute, which I found hilarious.

Post-race
Finish line had enough space for supporters to greet the finishing athletes in the amphitheatre before they went to the athlete garden. The showers were fine, although the area outside the showers was in plain view to anyone who was walking past on the street above the carpark where they set it up, so perhaps keep the kids away from that area. Nowhere near enough masseurs, so I didn't bother to wait.

The finisher's T-shirt was plain black. Pretty boring. They missed an opportunity by not making them red-and-white checks like the croatian sports teams (see pic below). This could have been a conversation starter shirt that people would wear to train in and keep as a souvenir, but the black shirt is just going to end up in the drawer with the rest of them.



The food was crap - apparently there was pizza early on, but people were just walking out with a whole pizzas and by the time I got there (I was top 75th overall) there was none left. You also had to pay for beers. It was only 1.5 euro, but still, it wasn't zero. So I had a shower and bailed.

After a sit down pizza and beer at a restaurant with my wonderful girlfriend who was my supporter on the day, we went to get all the kit. My bike was at T2 near the arena, so I went and got it. There was a bit of a line to hand back the timing chip and get out of T2 post-race.

Then the shuttles back to Verudela (where the car was) weren't running, possibly because the departure point was on the run course which took awhile to re-open to traffic. So unfortunately I had to burden my girlfriend with all my kit so I could ride the 5k back to Verudela to fetch the car and meet her back at the apartment. No one knew what was going on, the bus stop was unmanned. People would sit and wait 20min for the bus, then give up and walk off. It was a shambles, to be honest.

Ceremonies etc
After getting home, putting everything down and having a rest, my partner and I wandered into town to the amphitheatre to see what was happening. We got there, and there was literally nothing except the stage and a bunch of benches in front of it with people milling about. No bar, nothing like that. It was a really dead atmosphere. So we went for a walk and got an ice cream, and swung back by the arena to watch the roll-down. One of the age groups (M 30 or 40-something, can't remember) rolled down to like 20th place, so there was one very happy guy there, but I don't think much else rolled down - everyone seemed pretty keen to take the slots.

I think they missed a massive opportunity here. The amphitheatre (see pics below) is the coolest thing this race has going for it. It could have been awesome, but instead the atmosphere was pretty dead.





They could have put in some entertainment - I hear there's a summer show where they do re-enactments of gladiator fights in there. If you put on a show like that, to fill time between ceremonies, put a bar in there and set it up so the athletes would interact with one another (instead of just sitting on the benches facing the stage) then I suspect more people would have turned up and it could have been great. After rolldown we just got some dinner and went home (tired), so can't tell you if the after-party at a local bar was any fun.

My race
Swim was a shambles. Bike felt hard in the wind. In T2 I was feeling exhausted, and was thinking I was about to have my first meltdown-on-the-run experience, but I worked my way into the race (thanks, Clif Shots!). I negative split the run, and was able to put myself through a lot of pain in the last 5k. Taking my (voided) 36min swim time, I achieved my goal of going sub 5-hour in 2015. Top 20 in AG, top 75 overall, and I had a great time.

Things that could have been better
- Put the expo, registration, T1+T2 and race briefing all in the Verudela area (or at least make it so you don't have to do two bag drops!)
- Buoys that don't break free
- More buoys, bigger buoys, closer together
- More kayaks directing people around the swim course
- Better suggestions for sighting on the way back. Perhaps put some photos in the race briefing to warn people not to swim toward the wrong-but-similar-looking building.
- Perhaps it's possible to take out the speed humps on the bike course?
- Exactly 90k for the bike would have been good.
- Aid station in first 2km of run.
- Better food post race.
- More masseurs
- Croatia red and white finisher shirt
- Sort out the shuttles post-race.
- Have a bar, some novel entertainment, good pizza, and the afterparty near the finish line, and make it the focal point of the post-race!

Conclusion
Even putting aside the absurd swim (which could have been so great, because the water and location is really terrific!), there was lots that could have been done to make it smoother/easier for the athletes both before and after the race. A lot could have been organised better, and for next year, I expect that it will be.

But the thing is, I still had a great time. It's only writing this race report that made me stop and think about how it was actually a poorly executed race from a logistical standpoint. The report above might sound really negative because the list of things that could have been better is quite long, but don't let that get in the way of the fact that I had an amazing time, and loved every minute of it.

It would have been nice to have a week off to do a race-cation. Perhaps a couple of days post-race to relax around the beaches of Verudela (went there the day after the race, it was terrific!), then perhaps a few days in Venice.

I would say that if you're a super-serious triathlete and need everything to be organised perfectly to have a good time, then check back in a couple of years to see if this race has improved in that regard. But if all the little stuff doesn't bother you, then I'd recommend it, it was a blast.

If you've got any questions, then fire away.