On paper at the very least it looked like this was going to be a hard day. Bearing in mind the longest race I'd ever done was a long duathlon this race was always going to be eventful one way or the other. This race was the first of the new 70.3 branded formats located at Longleat, Wiltshire housed in a fabulous location within the grounds of the park. For me at least this race was going to be my final decision maker on whether I go for Ironman early next year plus to learn the logistics at WCT events. The day before involved the traditional packing of the coloured bags for each discipline and the handing in of the bikes. I can't say i was happy about handing my pride and joy in to be left outside overnight in what was a downpour, but thanks to an intervention from a neo pro (who was blatantly more prepared than I was) the beast was well covered with bin liners.
As expected I didn't get hell of a lot of sleep that night mainly due to an over enthusiastic hydration intake. Race morning rolled around (at 3:30am !!!!) and we all head down to Longleat to meet our collection coaches which take us 3 miles away to Shearwater for the swim start using a split transition style system. Being on the coach was like being in the film of 'The Fugitive' where you're all sat on a death row bus. Nobody looked particulary happy or chatty and after my 2nd malt loaf of the morning already I was feeling somewhat depressed about the lack of some decent food and drink as well. We arrived in darkness to find that it was still raining and cold with the Wiltshire mist hanging over the lake. I came to realise that with the change bags already handed in the day before there wasn't actually a lot to do other than wait.......for nearly 2 hours.
The organisers fired up the floodlights and the accompanying reggae music which then strangely shifted to baroque classical made everything feel very dramatic - at which point I fell asleep under a tree wrapped in my speedo coat for 20 minutes. The swim course had seen us all split into 4 waves of what was an inside then outside horseshoe shaped course. Having given my usual prayer to the race god ('don't let me puncture'). I headed down to get ready to go. I felt pretty cool about the whole thing. The conditions were to my liking (cold, high winds, unpleasant) and I knew I was here for a long day. The water was best described as treacle. It was so dense with algae you couldn't see your own hand pulling through the water when you swam (I thought the 'danger no swimming' signs that were cunningly removed were a nice touch). We had the usual 'oggy,oggy, oggy' and I'd put myself at the front of the line on the quiet end (unfortunatley this was the same plan as what the big hitters fancied as well). I was in the mood and then the gun went........
.............absolute bloody carnage ensured. I've seen more sedate sprit triathlons. Bearing in mind there were only 150 in my age group wave everyone was feeling very frisky. I found a good working group and bearing in mind the percentage of the swim versus the bike and the run is so comparably short for the 1.9k jaunt, it wasn't worth going nuts about. That said I was making good progress and it wasn't long before a group of 5 or 6 of us were scything through the back end of the wave that went 10 minutes before us. The rest of the swim went without incident although I thought things were getting a bit long. It later turned out this was the case (in fact the swim was 300m long according to the people I spoke to and those that set the course). I was out in 36 mins dead but when you take the 300m into account this puts it nearer to my ideal 30 min target.
There was a long 300m run to the bag collection and change tents and I saw a few familiar faces watching en route. I took my time in the tent. I was trying to convince myself it wasn't a race and it was more important to get it right then faff befroe I went out of the door. With aero helmet glasses and arm warmers on I exited the door to get the dream machine off it's rack. The bike course which I looked at the day before is best described as 'sporting'. The road surface is rough and the course was a 3 loop windy testing circuit containing a lot of rollers and a 1:7 climb that was over a mile long. At the beginning of this the heavens really let got with high winds and horizontal rain. I'd decided at the last minute not to wear a HR monitor but I would leave the computer running to check cadence and lap time. I struggled to determine the right pace to use. I blew through so many bikers early on at such a lazy pace I was starting to get confused about how hard to actually ride. It was also at this point I realised that the wheels I opted for (disc and tri spoke) may have been a little ambitious. I was getting blown all over the road although there is a certain pleasure when you catch someone and they can hear you coming 50m in advance. I also put 9 energy gels into a small drinks bottle and watered them down. I put this away inside 90 minutes. This was possibly too much !!!!!!! As it was I did the first lap in 50 minutes. Perfect pacing for my 2:30 target. It was at this point that I'd determined this target for a perfect course not for this sporting style though and I'd pay for this later on. I also stopped to disengage my rear brake as I was flexing the rear end so much the disc was rubbing on the brakes pads when I climbed !
My nutritional knowledge borders on novice level for this kind of race. Basically I'd drunk one 750ml bottle an hour of 'go' electrolyte fluid and then wondered why I needed to stop for the toilet every 40 minutes. This combined with a 'better have it as it's going' Gatorade on the last lap meant that I'd consumed nearly 3.5 litres of fluid, 8 gels, and two powerbars (to experiment with solid food) by the end of the leg. This was probably a bit excessive. Towards the end of lap 2 I was caught by the pro's who had gone off 30 mins ahead of us and were on the last lap of their bike. I don't know how it happened but I can't remember what possesed me to try and hold pace with (recent IMUK winner) Bryan Rhodes. It took me nearly 2 miles to see sense. This was an underlying fault though - I'm so used racing head to head with people, having triathlon put into a waiting game context was just too far removed from what i was used to. You overtake people and nobody cares. I made huge gains on the 1:7 climb (despite now realising I was overgeared having not taken power degradation into account) but I began to realise that I was getting slower. My subsequent laps were 55 minutes and the last was one longer due a dog leg but I was getting quite uncomfortable and losing focus over the last 5-6 miles. This was where the course made a mockery of the '70.3' classification. The bike leg was actually 60 miles, not the 56 it should be. This really dragged things out. Due to the course design and extra distance I finished the bike in 3:04 (and as it proved I wasn't hanging around). The run* course was a two lap affair over what was a clover leaf shaped course.
*I was not looking forward to this - the half marathon. It's well known that my run isn't, how you say, as dependable, as say my biking. I've never raced this long anyway and the longest run race I'd done upto this point was 11 miles 2 years ago. One of the reasons my nutrition being over the top was just sheer panic at what could happen over 13.1 miles. The race book did say it was flat though. Thats not quite how i remember it...........
Each leaf of the course involved a massive descent, an aid station, and then the ascent away again. The gradient of these climbs was comparable to say any one of the zig zags down at the beach. The last one though was like going up Creech in the purbecks. It was absolutely brutal. I got into my running quickly and within the first mile caught a lot of people and felt pretty good. The problem was that my left side of my stomach started playing up thereafter and I would have to go to the toilet every 10 minutes over the first lap to relieve the preasure. This meant inherently that every time I would gain I would then be caught again costing me 20 seconds each time. I did this 5 times in the end but with the situation I was in it was better to be prudent and err on the side of caution........which was a good policy until my calf blew at mile 6. Any ascent or descent at that point involved a lot of limping and the race transformed from one of ascertion to one purely of survival. This was followed by my left hip flexor starting to play up at mile 8 (this was probably caused by so much extensive climbing). Things were quite nasty at this point. Lap 2 involved walking all 3 aid stations to start on the flat coke.
Despite the problems, mentally I wasn't ever really being challenged (this was almost disapointing). I knew at times it was me against the course and at times my back was right up against the wall but mentally this just wasn't hard enough. I wonder now if I'll look at short course racing with the same level of enthusiasm.
I remember having a conversation with someone on the last climb about whether we were going to sprint it out (this guy didn't really want to but he didn't want to give it away either). I said I'd play it by ear. Once we got to the top of the climb I'd caught a group of 5 and was faced with the dilemma of what to do next. I decided that for the first time in the race it was time to crank it right up and bluff my left leg issues and put the hammer down. I guessed that if I took 30metres out of them they probably wouldn't come back. The Oakleys were pulled back down. The grimace was turned into a forced 'upward frown' looking thing and away we went. As I hit the 13 mile marker with the appropriate .1 miles to go I realised pretty quickly that it was blatantly nearer 400-500m left and that I'd shot my bolt for a .1. At which point one of the group behind decides to jump clear and then proceeds to run me down. It was probably the point where I realised 4 things, they were: I'd had a few highs and lows recently, some difficult sacrifies had been made this year, what my finishers photo pose was going to be*, and I'd be damned if after over 5 hours of racing that some muppet was going to take me with 50 metres to go.
* You get your your finishing photo taken as you cross the line and the final timer. The big thought of the day was do I go for the 'fingers to the sky', the 'arm pumping special', 'the courtsey', the 'planet of the apes on knees finale special' amongst others as my big moment. (I opted for the 'I'm blatantly knackered but look at my bicep' shot).
Over the run course I clocked 1:47 with multiple stops and power climbs aplenty. Ironically my run holds up well over this kind of pace and I'm much more competitve over this than my bike ability probably is which is just bizarre. If i could determine the cause of the calf problem sub 1:40 is easily possible. I placed 135th overall in the end out of (and this isn't confirmed yet as people were still out there last time I checked) between 530-630 starters. By the way, I was 120th coming off the bike. With all the problems I had I still only lost 15 places on the run leg. I had the 205th fastest run, 120th ish bike, and 130 ish fastest swim. This makes everything relatively well balanced all things considered.
Overall it was a 5:35 time which is a lot slower than my sub 5 trarget but bear in mind the winning pro did 4:15 (compared to the usual 3:55) and the likes of Luc Van Lierde could 'only' manage 4:30. I was 22nd in my age group out of 130 entered (although there were a lot less than this that actually started - number unconfirmed at this time although I suspect it was around 90) and with 17 slots for the new 70.3 World champs on the cards I got a slot on roll down, and then turned it down. My plan was if i don't make the short course worlds in the GB team next year to re-enter this race as next years slots go towards the same event for November '06 (at which point with my long course intentions anyway I should have a much better engine by then). A 5 minute saving would have got me inside the top 100 on no long course training ! The fact I got inside the top 250 meant i got one of the limited edition baseball hats anyway !!!!
All in all a good race for racers if you want a challenge (and not a time), a not particulary spectator friendly course, and blatantly nowhere near 70.3 but actually nearer 75 miles of hell !!!!
All in all I realised I have a lot to learn and this interpreation of triathlon is effectively almost a different sport with it's own culture, values, and style of racing. Whereas Ironman is the ultimate, the fallout is huge and although I will go for it as planned in '06, longer term I may hang around at this distance for a while.
Bryce.
As expected I didn't get hell of a lot of sleep that night mainly due to an over enthusiastic hydration intake. Race morning rolled around (at 3:30am !!!!) and we all head down to Longleat to meet our collection coaches which take us 3 miles away to Shearwater for the swim start using a split transition style system. Being on the coach was like being in the film of 'The Fugitive' where you're all sat on a death row bus. Nobody looked particulary happy or chatty and after my 2nd malt loaf of the morning already I was feeling somewhat depressed about the lack of some decent food and drink as well. We arrived in darkness to find that it was still raining and cold with the Wiltshire mist hanging over the lake. I came to realise that with the change bags already handed in the day before there wasn't actually a lot to do other than wait.......for nearly 2 hours.
The organisers fired up the floodlights and the accompanying reggae music which then strangely shifted to baroque classical made everything feel very dramatic - at which point I fell asleep under a tree wrapped in my speedo coat for 20 minutes. The swim course had seen us all split into 4 waves of what was an inside then outside horseshoe shaped course. Having given my usual prayer to the race god ('don't let me puncture'). I headed down to get ready to go. I felt pretty cool about the whole thing. The conditions were to my liking (cold, high winds, unpleasant) and I knew I was here for a long day. The water was best described as treacle. It was so dense with algae you couldn't see your own hand pulling through the water when you swam (I thought the 'danger no swimming' signs that were cunningly removed were a nice touch). We had the usual 'oggy,oggy, oggy' and I'd put myself at the front of the line on the quiet end (unfortunatley this was the same plan as what the big hitters fancied as well). I was in the mood and then the gun went........
.............absolute bloody carnage ensured. I've seen more sedate sprit triathlons. Bearing in mind there were only 150 in my age group wave everyone was feeling very frisky. I found a good working group and bearing in mind the percentage of the swim versus the bike and the run is so comparably short for the 1.9k jaunt, it wasn't worth going nuts about. That said I was making good progress and it wasn't long before a group of 5 or 6 of us were scything through the back end of the wave that went 10 minutes before us. The rest of the swim went without incident although I thought things were getting a bit long. It later turned out this was the case (in fact the swim was 300m long according to the people I spoke to and those that set the course). I was out in 36 mins dead but when you take the 300m into account this puts it nearer to my ideal 30 min target.
There was a long 300m run to the bag collection and change tents and I saw a few familiar faces watching en route. I took my time in the tent. I was trying to convince myself it wasn't a race and it was more important to get it right then faff befroe I went out of the door. With aero helmet glasses and arm warmers on I exited the door to get the dream machine off it's rack. The bike course which I looked at the day before is best described as 'sporting'. The road surface is rough and the course was a 3 loop windy testing circuit containing a lot of rollers and a 1:7 climb that was over a mile long. At the beginning of this the heavens really let got with high winds and horizontal rain. I'd decided at the last minute not to wear a HR monitor but I would leave the computer running to check cadence and lap time. I struggled to determine the right pace to use. I blew through so many bikers early on at such a lazy pace I was starting to get confused about how hard to actually ride. It was also at this point I realised that the wheels I opted for (disc and tri spoke) may have been a little ambitious. I was getting blown all over the road although there is a certain pleasure when you catch someone and they can hear you coming 50m in advance. I also put 9 energy gels into a small drinks bottle and watered them down. I put this away inside 90 minutes. This was possibly too much !!!!!!! As it was I did the first lap in 50 minutes. Perfect pacing for my 2:30 target. It was at this point that I'd determined this target for a perfect course not for this sporting style though and I'd pay for this later on. I also stopped to disengage my rear brake as I was flexing the rear end so much the disc was rubbing on the brakes pads when I climbed !
My nutritional knowledge borders on novice level for this kind of race. Basically I'd drunk one 750ml bottle an hour of 'go' electrolyte fluid and then wondered why I needed to stop for the toilet every 40 minutes. This combined with a 'better have it as it's going' Gatorade on the last lap meant that I'd consumed nearly 3.5 litres of fluid, 8 gels, and two powerbars (to experiment with solid food) by the end of the leg. This was probably a bit excessive. Towards the end of lap 2 I was caught by the pro's who had gone off 30 mins ahead of us and were on the last lap of their bike. I don't know how it happened but I can't remember what possesed me to try and hold pace with (recent IMUK winner) Bryan Rhodes. It took me nearly 2 miles to see sense. This was an underlying fault though - I'm so used racing head to head with people, having triathlon put into a waiting game context was just too far removed from what i was used to. You overtake people and nobody cares. I made huge gains on the 1:7 climb (despite now realising I was overgeared having not taken power degradation into account) but I began to realise that I was getting slower. My subsequent laps were 55 minutes and the last was one longer due a dog leg but I was getting quite uncomfortable and losing focus over the last 5-6 miles. This was where the course made a mockery of the '70.3' classification. The bike leg was actually 60 miles, not the 56 it should be. This really dragged things out. Due to the course design and extra distance I finished the bike in 3:04 (and as it proved I wasn't hanging around). The run* course was a two lap affair over what was a clover leaf shaped course.
*I was not looking forward to this - the half marathon. It's well known that my run isn't, how you say, as dependable, as say my biking. I've never raced this long anyway and the longest run race I'd done upto this point was 11 miles 2 years ago. One of the reasons my nutrition being over the top was just sheer panic at what could happen over 13.1 miles. The race book did say it was flat though. Thats not quite how i remember it...........
Each leaf of the course involved a massive descent, an aid station, and then the ascent away again. The gradient of these climbs was comparable to say any one of the zig zags down at the beach. The last one though was like going up Creech in the purbecks. It was absolutely brutal. I got into my running quickly and within the first mile caught a lot of people and felt pretty good. The problem was that my left side of my stomach started playing up thereafter and I would have to go to the toilet every 10 minutes over the first lap to relieve the preasure. This meant inherently that every time I would gain I would then be caught again costing me 20 seconds each time. I did this 5 times in the end but with the situation I was in it was better to be prudent and err on the side of caution........which was a good policy until my calf blew at mile 6. Any ascent or descent at that point involved a lot of limping and the race transformed from one of ascertion to one purely of survival. This was followed by my left hip flexor starting to play up at mile 8 (this was probably caused by so much extensive climbing). Things were quite nasty at this point. Lap 2 involved walking all 3 aid stations to start on the flat coke.
Despite the problems, mentally I wasn't ever really being challenged (this was almost disapointing). I knew at times it was me against the course and at times my back was right up against the wall but mentally this just wasn't hard enough. I wonder now if I'll look at short course racing with the same level of enthusiasm.
I remember having a conversation with someone on the last climb about whether we were going to sprint it out (this guy didn't really want to but he didn't want to give it away either). I said I'd play it by ear. Once we got to the top of the climb I'd caught a group of 5 and was faced with the dilemma of what to do next. I decided that for the first time in the race it was time to crank it right up and bluff my left leg issues and put the hammer down. I guessed that if I took 30metres out of them they probably wouldn't come back. The Oakleys were pulled back down. The grimace was turned into a forced 'upward frown' looking thing and away we went. As I hit the 13 mile marker with the appropriate .1 miles to go I realised pretty quickly that it was blatantly nearer 400-500m left and that I'd shot my bolt for a .1. At which point one of the group behind decides to jump clear and then proceeds to run me down. It was probably the point where I realised 4 things, they were: I'd had a few highs and lows recently, some difficult sacrifies had been made this year, what my finishers photo pose was going to be*, and I'd be damned if after over 5 hours of racing that some muppet was going to take me with 50 metres to go.
* You get your your finishing photo taken as you cross the line and the final timer. The big thought of the day was do I go for the 'fingers to the sky', the 'arm pumping special', 'the courtsey', the 'planet of the apes on knees finale special' amongst others as my big moment. (I opted for the 'I'm blatantly knackered but look at my bicep' shot).
Over the run course I clocked 1:47 with multiple stops and power climbs aplenty. Ironically my run holds up well over this kind of pace and I'm much more competitve over this than my bike ability probably is which is just bizarre. If i could determine the cause of the calf problem sub 1:40 is easily possible. I placed 135th overall in the end out of (and this isn't confirmed yet as people were still out there last time I checked) between 530-630 starters. By the way, I was 120th coming off the bike. With all the problems I had I still only lost 15 places on the run leg. I had the 205th fastest run, 120th ish bike, and 130 ish fastest swim. This makes everything relatively well balanced all things considered.
Overall it was a 5:35 time which is a lot slower than my sub 5 trarget but bear in mind the winning pro did 4:15 (compared to the usual 3:55) and the likes of Luc Van Lierde could 'only' manage 4:30. I was 22nd in my age group out of 130 entered (although there were a lot less than this that actually started - number unconfirmed at this time although I suspect it was around 90) and with 17 slots for the new 70.3 World champs on the cards I got a slot on roll down, and then turned it down. My plan was if i don't make the short course worlds in the GB team next year to re-enter this race as next years slots go towards the same event for November '06 (at which point with my long course intentions anyway I should have a much better engine by then). A 5 minute saving would have got me inside the top 100 on no long course training ! The fact I got inside the top 250 meant i got one of the limited edition baseball hats anyway !!!!
All in all a good race for racers if you want a challenge (and not a time), a not particulary spectator friendly course, and blatantly nowhere near 70.3 but actually nearer 75 miles of hell !!!!
All in all I realised I have a lot to learn and this interpreation of triathlon is effectively almost a different sport with it's own culture, values, and style of racing. Whereas Ironman is the ultimate, the fallout is huge and although I will go for it as planned in '06, longer term I may hang around at this distance for a while.
Bryce.
Last edited by:
UK Gear Muncher: Sep 12, 05 8:52