Greetings, please forgive my long absence from the blog. To be fair there has been little to write about given the triathlon season has been on a winter break. I have been continually training mind you, although my swim training has been entirely in the pool and I have confined myself to the treadmill for my runs. I have done very lttle by way of training on the bike. Back in January or February, I went for a cycle to Howth with Cian, one of my freinds from the traithlon club and made the mistake of not washing my bik after that wet cycle. Consequently when I looked at the bike a couple of months later, the chain was completely rusted and so I had to replace it. Subsequently I got out on the bike a couple fo time before the the Phoenix Park duathlon in April which I was taking part in. The duathlon was uncharted territory for me fitness wise given my lack of cycling, but it went rather well. I ran comfortably and while i was about 3 or 4 minutes slower on the bike than I was in the triathlon in the Phoenix park last summer, i was happy enough to come through it unscathed.
Then a couple of weeks ago 70 Belpark Triathlon Club members made their way to Carlow for the first national series triathlon of the season. I had done this race the previous year so it would be a good measure of where my fitmess levels were by comparison over the last 12 months. For once I decided to get a lift to the location rather than drive myself , which thanks to Antonia and Max was great fun and made the journey fly by. When we arrived, most competitors had already set their bikes up in transition so there wasnt a very long time for us to wait till the race began, at saying that we still had to wait an hour which is probably too long. Racers ideally want to get started as soon as they can once they have arrived on site an dthe necessary pre-race talk has been given by the organisers. The upside is the race itself was a late start compared to the uaual start time of 9am, here it started at 12 noon.
There were 500 competitors and with such a large field it meant everyone was split into waves of about 90 people with a mass start in the water. I was curious to see how my open water swimming would go given I had only been sea swimming a couple of times in the last 10 days. We swam about 150 upstream and rounded a buoy and then itw as downstream for 600 metres. Its always a challenge trying to pace oneself in open water swims. Theres no frame of reference like there is in a pool. You dont have any lines to guide you or familiar markers and you arent gettig a mini pause every 35 or 50 metres. No with open water swims you start and you have to keep thrashing away till its over. I say thrashing, there was only a slight bit of thrashing, onece when there was a logjam rounding the first buoy and another time when someone kicked me in the head by accident. Once I managed to get into a rhythm I felt good. In fact in the closing 300 metres I noticed I was passing people out, which rarely ever happens. The swim went very well for me, I managed to swim 747m and swim the distance in just over 13 minutes, a full minute quicker tha last year, when to be fair I swam over 800 m for some reason.
My transition went very quickly and without incident. I chose to use my runners on teh bike as opposed to my clip in shoes and this saved me time. The cycle itself was a gradual incline of 10km out away from town and then straight back. I pushed alot of the bike, hitting almost 62km ph on the way home at one point. I managed to bike over 2 minutes quicker than last year. I think what might have helped was the fact I ate some wine gums before the race started. This isnt somethig i’d normally do, but i may make a harbit of doing so, given my very respectable bike time here.
The it was onto the run. I’m always cautious on the run these days given my history of calf issues. Thankfully the run was relatively flat along the banks of the river so it wasnt too demanding. The sun was beginning to break through the clouds at this stage and I sensed I had already been a tad sunburnt through the cloudcover. I managed to finish the run 10 secinds quicker than last year. So overall I swam quicker, biked quicker and ran quicker and my transitions were both quicker than last year.
I managed 70th overall and 14th in my age group which, given that this race was a national series race , I think is a very respectable result. Onwards now to Tri Athy which was the location of my first ever triathlon in 2017 !!
mathieunorry 