I had a lot to learn from this race…
May be long for some 
i will upload some photos soon
http://sergiomarques.planetaclix.pt/reports/Sater2005.htm
" **Saved by the run!!! **
Today the ETU European Long Distance Triathlon championships took place in the small town of Säter in Sweden . I was representing my country and was aiming for a good race after some time doing just Portuguese races. The race venue is absolutely fabulous, the 2 lap swim is in a calm lake, the bike consists of 5 laps in country roads with a somewhat technical section inside the town and the run has 4 laps near the lake shore and the streets of Säter.
The gun went off at 8am with about 30 elite male athletes for all over Europe on the first wave. I felt good swimming and between punches and kicks I found a good set of feet to swim on until the first turnaround where I completely lost my “ride”. As usual (something that I need to work on), I was left all alone pulling a group. After the end of the first lap and a short run, I saw that Vabrousek was in my feet among others. Second lap I had one single goal, losing the smallest amount of time to the front pack and pulled the entire group the whole second lap. It was a good swim for me, I only lost 4:20 to the front swimmers that compared to the same athletes on last years World champs. This meant that I shaved almost half of the time lost on the swim (almost 8 minutes last year). Vabrousek came off the water just behind me. That may be good for me I thought, but soon enough I changed my mind, not because Vabrousek but because I had the most miserable bike ride in my long distance triathlon career.
I felt terrible to say the least on the bike, and I saw the complete group passing by me in the first kilometres of the bike course. I didn’t panic at first but as soon as I finished the first lap I knew that something was wrong. My heart rate was dropping fast to levels that where absolutely ridiculous, and I felt that my legs where hurting and didn’t have power to put on the back wheel. I was in survival mode for almost 100km of the 120km of the ride. I rotated my bodylink watch so that I couldn’t see the HR number and just tried to ride as fast (fast may be the wrong word) as I could and hope to have a good run, DNF was not in my mind. Even with the poor riding I ended with somewhat similar laps: 38:42, 38:56, 38:37, 39:07 and 40:10 was the lap times that I took during the ride. I felt absolutely miserable at the end of the ride and lost a huge chunk of time to the leaders. It’s not that I was expecting to gain any time on the bike but I sure wasn’t expecting to lose so much time.
I left T2 in 18 th position, way off pace and certainly in a compromising position to my expectations, but I thought that I could minimize the damage in the run if I felt good. As I passed the 2 km mark I took a 7:14 split, not that bad so I tried to motivate myself to keep on going. I took me a lot time to start passing athletes but still its better than being passed. I was taking splits in every km that I could and I had lots of km at around 3:30 pace mixed with lower marks in the descents and slower pace on the uphill sections (nothing wrong there obviously). Paulo, my coach was shouting that at this pace I could end in the top 10, which wasn’t that bad considering the day I was having. I was having a consistent and constant pace out there and soon enough I was passing more and more athletes. I entered the top10 at the end of the 3 rd lap and Paulo said that the 8 th place was three and a half minutes ahead of me, could be possible to finish a couple of places higher in the results sheet, so I kept going with about the same splits as the other laps. I passed 9 th place with 5 km to go and the 8 th place with about 2-3km for the finish line. As soon as I saw that I had nobody trying to catch me I eased my pace since there was no way I could catch 7 th place and cruised the last 1.5km for a total time off around 6:02.
I was definitely saved by a very good run but my ride was very disappointing for what I’m capable off right now. The positive side was that I proved myself that giving up just because I’m having a bad race it’s not the way to go and good things can still happen later on.
I will now look forward to a better race in Fredericia , Denmark , the venue of the Long Distance world championships, but my eyes are focused on the pacific sea for now on, my debut on the Ironman Hawaii.
Happy training to all. "
Nice to see ppl that you read about here irl in races!