Operation Secret Sombrero - Ironman Cozumel 2012

Ironman Cozumel 2012

Operation secret sombrero

My two “A” races for 2012 were the Alpe D’Huez Long Course and then Ironman Wales, both of which I missed: my journey to the Alpe D’Huez was sabotaged by the SNCF, and then I was sick for IM Wales and spent the weekend of the race in bed. A couple of days after IM Wales I was in a bit of a state because of the way things had worked out and I decided to see if was possible to get an entry to another IM distance race before the end of the year. After a little work online I worked out that the only races that I might be able to get into were Challenge Barcelona, which was still accepting entries, and IM Cozumel, which I could get a slot for if I booked a trip with Endurance Sports Travel. I didn’t really fancy going to Barcelona again and the date would have been very difficult to organise because of work. I knew nothing about IM Cozumel but with a bit of research it started to sound attractive: held on the island of Cozumel off the coast of Mexico, nice swim, nice flat fast bike, enthusiastic locals and easy to get to with lots of direct flights to Cancun available at reasonable prices. I checked my diary and I could manage a week off work then without much difficulty, and when I raised the issue with Pam she was surprisingly happy for me to go. I justified it to myself on the grounds that I’d had such a difficult summer at work that I was entitled to have a ridiculously self indulgent week by myself in the Caribbean, dammit, and I got on the phone to EST in the States clutching a credit card which actually started smouldering during the call when they cleared the payment. Thus was born Operation Secret Sombrero.

I had 10 weeks between IM Wales and IM Cozumel. The first week was mostly spent recovering from whatever it was had kept me from the sheep and hills of Pembrokeshire, leaving 7 weeks training with a two week taper. IM Training in October and November is tricky when you work in a university because it’s a busy time of the year with all the students and everything, but with a bit of creativity you can fit in early morning turbo sessions that finish before 7, late evening runs with a headtorch and do other things like getting your swims in while your kids are having their swimming lessons. The weather’s not favourable to cycling either, especially when you want to spend at least some time with your children and so I put in some very cold early morning rides on Sundays, including one where, despite wearing two pairs of gloves, my hands were so cold that I couldn’t get any food out of my pockets or even a bottle from its cage and I ended up totally hypoclycaemic, slumped in a car park warming my hands up in my armpits until I could manage to get the wrapping off a powerbar. I also put in a couple of (for me) epic turbo trainer sessions when it was too wet to ride, including a 3 hour steady effort which I almost needed therapy after. My average training time per week for the seven weeks before the taper was 10 hours and 40 minutes, a consistency I have never managed before.

When you’re living in a cold climate and you’re headed for a tropical race you need to get some heat acclimatisation done, because there are some important changes to things like sweat rate and salinity that come after a couple of weeks with some exercise in the heat. Not having a suitable shed or small room I couldn’t put the turbo trainer in with a heater, so I did mine by wearing thermals while turbo training with no fan. This is a really disgusting way to spend 45 minutes and you have to do a lot of laundry, but it gets the job done. Having found out that the bike is very straightforward and flat but can be windy I put in some time trying to make sure that I’d be as aero as possible: I had a proper bike fit done which made a big difference to my ability to stay in the bars for long periods, I agonised about bottle cage placements and I twitched nervously when I thought about clothing. Eventually I decided to go with a white Orca tri-top I have rather than my TTTC top because the  club one is a bit loose in places and also a bit short and I was worried about sunburn. I also picked up an Aquasphere swimskin for next to nothing from eBay, it being a non-wetsuit swim, meaning that I felt forced to do more swim training so that I didn’t look like a dick who thinks he can buy speed rather than putting the effort in. I tried to do all of this as quietly as possible because if for some reason I didn’t make it I didn’t think I could stand the humiliation of DNS-ing yet another race, but it did slip out occasionally - when the detective team of Barr and Todd noted that I had turned up for a run in Richmond Park after putting in 80km on the bike, for example, they knew that something was up and interrogated me until I spilled the beans.

So stupid that if you gave me a penny for my thoughts you’d get change

Eventually the time came to head for the subtropics and away from wet, cold England. I booked a cab to take me to Heathrow T5, loaded it with bike box and rucksack and off I went. The cabbie, I’m pleased to say, entertained me with his views on corporal punishment for children until we reached the airport and, having cravenly agreed with him I  went into the airport. I looked at the departure board - no flight. I looked again. Still no mention of my flight. I started to feel really, really bad - check the documents. The flight’s from Gatwick. It’s the return flight that goes to Heathrow. Oh dear.

Bike boxes on the ferry

I had an hour and forty minutes to get to Gatwick. That’s do-able. Maybe. Straight to the cab rank, into the nearest black cab and off we go. The cabbie commiserates with me and tells me that he gets at least one similarly stupid person per month (not his words). we have to do 40-odd miles around the M25, one of the most crowded roads in Europe, at 9AM on a Thursday. There’s a long holdup by the M3 junction and it’s starting to look grim as I sit in the back checking flight prices to Cancun for the next morning (more than the cost of the whole trip...) and trying not to look at the meter. Finally we’re through the jam and off we go. The road’s clear but the information boards are saying there’s delays between J7 and J8, just before the turn for Gatwick. I am beyond miserable. If I miss the race because of being a complete f***wit I will have to retire from triathlon and take up a hobby more commensurate with my feeble intellectual abilities, something like trying to put one block on top of another, trying to count beyond 5, finger painting, or watching football and eating pies.

Thankfully the promised delays never materialised and we sailed onto the M23 and then into Gatwick. I handed the cabbie my long-suffering credit card: when he gave it back I held it close to my ear and could hear it sobbing, but I was there with 45 minutes to spare before take off, and 5 minutes before the bag drop closed. Done. Onto the plane and off to Cancun, then a long period of hurry up and wait: the guy from EST who was picking me up was meant to collect three other people, none of whom seemed to have made it onto the flight. Perhaps they all went to Heathrow as well and hadn’t given themselves as much cock-up recovery time as I had.

Now don’t you boys go a-drinkin’ nor smokin’ weed

Finally in Cozumel I just relaxed, registered, went for a spin on the bike and did some swimming. The swim course at Chankanaab Marine Park was open for practice on the Friday and Saturday and I went both days. The wind was up and there was quite a lot of swell both days but the water was the perfect temperature and astonishingly clear, with lots of fish and other marine life to admire. Saturday afternoon I racked my bike and handed over my transition bags. T1 for Cozumel is the car park for the Marine Park and my rack was in the overflow car park with lots of sand and gravel on the floor and, although it wasn’t too far from the changing tent it was a good long way from the bike start.  

The swim course the day before the race. Changing tent for T1 and bag racks on the right.

I was still jetlagged which was a minor blessing - I was asleep by 9.30 the night before the race and wide awake at 3.45 (alarm set for 4) which made for a great start to the day. The hotel were serving an early breakfast and I had a small bowl of cereal and snagged a banana to eat later. Then a lift over to the start with one of the EST guys who bid us farewell and admonished us “Now don’t you boys go a-drinkin’ nor smokin’ weed today, you hear me?”. We promised not to.

Transition was the usual bustle. I borrowed a pump and blew my tyres up, ate my banana, taped some gels to my bars, smeared some parts of myself with vaseline and then smeared some of the non-vaselined parts with waterproof factor 40 sunblock, then wandered over to the swim start. The pros went 20 minutes before the mortals and then it was our turn. The swim start is in front of a large concrete pen that’s used for dolphin displays and contains about 10 captive dolphins that are presumably completely insane from being kept in the aquatic equivalent of a small featureless cage. To get in the water you walk out on the pier that’s built around the dolphin pen and jump in. There’s plenty of room even with a couple of thousand people and I started fairly near the front on the right hand side.

Elbows and currents

The swim is a straightforward rectangular course - you swim Northeast, parallel to the shore, for about 800m, then round and back Southwest further out for a long 1900m leg, then back in towards the shore and Northeast again to the swim finish. Normally there is a mild southwesterly current which doesn’t have much effect on the two NE legs when you’re closer to shore but gives swimmers a bit of a boost on the long SW leg when they’re a bit further out to sea, leading to a relatively fast swim. I was hoping for something around 1:10 to 1:12, but as we trod water waiting for the start there was a strong wind blowing chop into our faces and if we just trod water we would move back towards the pier with the current. Looking again I saw that there were hundreds of people hanging onto the wire mesh under the pier that keeps the dolphins in. Suddenly and without any warning the horn went off and the usual anarchy ensued. The lovely clear water turned blue-white with bubbles and a couple of thousand normally civilised people became wild animals kicking and punching to get themselves space and position. It wasn’t too bad after the first few minutes but it stayed mostly full-contact until the first turnaround, and there were a lot of people who seemed to have seeded themselves rather optimistically, including one massive group that I couldn’t get through at all and eventually had to swim around which meant a substantial detour. Nevermind.

Once round the turn buoy things were a lot cleaner and I just aimed myself straight down the buoy line and went for it. This meant that it stayed a bit physical and I did use my elbows a little (I’m not the greatest in the World at swimming straight but some people really shouldn’t be allowed in the water unless there are black lines on the bottom to follow) but I knew I was on course. Sighting was a little tricky because of the chop and it often took two or three looks before I’d get a good line once I was past each buoy but they seemed to fly past and the current was pushing us along good and fast. Once round the second turn buoy I was following a group of swimmers who didn’t go directly back up the buoy line but went a lot closer to shore. I wanted to swim nearer the buoys so I left them and tried to angle across but even though I was swimming strongly and felt good I didn’t seem to get anywhere, and being in no man’s land between the shore and the buoys I didn’t have anyone to draft off. I was finding it difficult to sight again because of the chop from the headwind but I just kept on swimming hard and slowly made my way to the steps of the swim exit, where I was dismayed to see 1:26 on the clock. I didn’t realise it at the time but the current was far stronger this year than usual and was active much closer in to the shore, so while we were getting a boost going SW, the NE legs, especially the second one were very slow going indeed. Most people were 10-15 minutes slower than usual: in total only 75 people swam faster than an hour and most of those were pros, and a considerable number of people (somewhere between 35 and 460 depending on which rumour you listen to) failed to make the 2:20 swim cutoff. I only found out about this after the race and spent the whole triathlon thinking that I’d just been rubbish.

Sun and wind

I was through T1 in 6:41, not fast but I had a long way to go after unracking the bike, plus I had to do things like clean the sand off my feet before I put my bike shoes on. Onto the bike and off down the long straight road towards the southern tip of the island. No problems until I rounded the bend at the Southern tip of the Island and started the 20km stretch back up the East coast. The prevailing wind in Cozumel in November is an Easterly to a South-Easterly, but today we had a brisk North-Easterly which meant that we were going full into a headwind for this section. Nothing to do but stay aero, shift up and try to keep to a reasonable cadence. Aside from the wind, this section of the bike course is lovely: the road is very close to the sea and there are white sand beaches, lagoons with lily flowers, palm trees and packs of drafters to look at. Towards the end of the windy part I was overtaken by a peloton of about 40 riders in a double paceline. I really hate this sort of thing - I’d have to burn too many matches if I wanted to get away in front of them so my only option was to sit up and let them go past. I took advantage of the break to tell them exactly what I thought of their cheating ways, and they all ignored me and stared at the wheel in front. I’m pleased to say that there were quite a few people in the next penalty tent that I passed.

Me heading into the wind. This must have been taken on the first or second lap because I don't have anyone from Argentina glued to my back wheel.

I found it hot on the bike, even though some of the people from Texas and Florida laughed at me when I said it was near the upper limit of what I could tolerate. I’d like to see them do some of the races in the UK in April or October (or June and July for that matter). The temperature in the shade was in the upper 20s but we were out in the full sun most of the time with the heat radiating back up to us from the blacktop. I was glad I’d put in the disgusting trainer with thermals sessions, and also that I’d really made a big effort to get my weight down before the race so I wasn’t carrying any excess lard for insulation. There were a lot of aid stations, roughly every 10 kms on the bike and I was snagging bottles of water and Gatorade at all of them. The Gatorade mostly went down my throat and the water went over me. They were doing a super job of keeping the drinks cold and some of the bottles of water I got even had ice in them. Because it was hot and I was thirsty almost all the time I didn’t feel like eating anything: I had a couple of gels but that was it. I estimate that I drank somewhere between 5 and 8 litres of fluid on the bike and I didn’t need to pee at all until a couple of hours after the race so I must have been pumping out a lot of sweat in addition to all the bottles of water I dumped over myself.

Finally through the wind and onto the road called the “Transvasal” which goes Northwest across the island back to San Miguel, the town. In past years this is where the Easterly or Southeasterly wind has provided a helpful push but this year it was blowing across the road, although not strongly because we were sheltered by trees. Back into town, round a few bends and I was off onto the second lap. The wind was picking up and the leg back up no the coast was no fun at all this time because the headwind was full-on and an effort to ride into. My backside was also starting to complain but not too badly. The flat, straight roads you ride on mean that there’s very little opportunity to get out of the aerobars and if you’re aiming for a decent bike split you just have to stay as aero as possible for the whole time. The only respite I found was on a couple of small rises on the coast road where I got out of the saddle for a few turns of the pedals just to shake everything up and let things move around a bit. Onto the third lap and I was feeling good - no sign of my heart rate creeping up, which meant that the rate of fluid intake must be about right, pedals still turning nicely and getting some good speed up on the parts of the course where there wasn’t a headwind. Back around the bottom of the island and into the wind which was now really whistling around my helmet. Stay aero and spin and I was staying left most of the way because of the slower riders, some of whom I was lapping and some of whom I guess were just having a hard time on their last lap.

Of course, if you don’t want to stay aero and put in the effort into the wind you can always just draft. After the first lap I didn’t see any more big pelotons but there were some people taking advantage of the low numbers of draft marshals to catch a ride on that last leg into the wind. I picked up my own personal leech, one Jorge from Argentina (according to his number) who would sit on my wheel until I realised he was there and slowed down until he was forced to pass. He would then ride a little way up the road and sit up, waiting for someone else to come past that he could stick himself to. This happened several times and the last time I gave him a bit of a mouthful, after which he rode up to a group of three that were all riding very close and, as far as I could make out, sat on the back and asked them if he could join in. There were also some of the faster AG women sitting on any wheel they could find, the most shameless being one Isabella from Nicaragua who I don’t think had her nose in the wind for more than a couple of seconds for the entire 20km stretch. There were quite a few bikes in the road, sure, but it was perfectly possible to ride clean and I made sure that I was doing it the whole time. Fortunately after we’d made the final turn onto the Transvasal most of the drafting stopped, except for Isabella from Nicaragua who I saw several more times, each time about 30cm from someone’s back wheel. 

I went through 100 miles in 5:01, fractionally off 20 miles an hour, and my average speed went down a little more because of the wind, but overall I was very pleased with my pacing throughout the bike which was nice and even for a final bike split of 5:43.49 (NB according to Mr Garmin the bike leg was about 1.5 km long). I kept the speed up all the way into T2, took my feet out of my shoes a few hundred metres before the dismount line, zoomed up and leapt off my bike and almost fell over. For some reason my toes on both feet were incredibly sore and cramped up and I could only hobble into the changing tent. I ditched my watch into my transition bag so that I could put on the Garmin that had been mounted on my bike, checked the time and went out on the run which is three laps of 14km each, up and down the road that heads North from the centre of San Miguel de Cozumel. I knew that I wasn’t going to make my target time of 10:30 by quite a long way: the currents in the sea (although at the time I thought it was just my bad swimming) and the wind had put paid to that, but I was still in with a chance of making 11 hours and I knew from my last check of my watch that I needed to run a 3:40 marathon to do that. I’ve gone 3:27 for an IM marathon  in the past so I was hopeful that I’d manage it. I started at what felt like a comfortable pace and after a hilariously fast first km (4:11) I settled down to a steady pace of around 4:45 to 4:55 per km  and started to build a buffer against the inevitable slowdown that would come towards the end of the run.

Peanuts from heaven

The first lap went by relatively easily. It was still hot but there were a lot of aid stations mostly manned by local kids who were shouting “Pepsi! Agua! Hielo!” at us as we went past. I wasn’t sure what “hielo” was and was wondering why they were shouting “yellow” (it means “ice”). I kept on throwing water over myself and, despite not having the word in my Spanish vocabulary also went for the ice down the tri-top and under the hat option a few times. Back into town where there were a lot of people and a load of drummers who seemed to be powered by Duracell because they must have kept on drumming for about 6 hours solid, and out again onto the second lap. I started feeling a bit rough towards the halfway mark and my pace slowed to about 5 minutes per km. I was through halfway in 1:42 but was feeling bad and had to walk slowly through an aid station almost immediately afterwards. I felt as though I needed to eat something having been going on nothing but liquids all day so I scarfed down my emergency double-caffeinated gel and had a bit of a graze. They had some salted peanuts at the aid station and I ate a handful which tasted amazingly, astonishingly good: if Heston Blumenthal could work out how to recreate that sensation he’d retire weeping because he’d achieved culinary perfection and it was never going to get better than that. I got back up to speed but then had to walk for a couple of minutes again just before making it back into town, during which time I treated myself to more peanuts, which tasted nearly as good as the last lot. I got myself going again but then as I came round the turnaround for my last lap I went past the big screen for the finish and noticed that the time it was showing was 9:59. At the same time the announcer was congratulating someone on a sub-10 finish so I concluded that I’d got my time calculations wrong - I needed about 1:10 for the last lap if I kept up a good pace and there was no way I could run it in less than an hour to make the sub-11 target. Wham. That was demoralising and I was now finding it really difficult to push myself along. I couldn’t manage more than 5:30 a km for about 10 minutes and I was feeling really bad until at about the 30km mark, as the sun set behind me I stopped running and started walking. I walked for about 5 minutes and then felt able to start running again, albeit slowly.

On the run and feeling the heat.

Not long after the 31km mark I was suddenly struck by the thought that the time on the big screen might have been the time since the start of the pro race, which would put it 20 minutes faster than the age-groupers. I checked the time of day on the Garmin which was on a different screen to the main run one, which I keep set to pace, distance, time elapsed and HR. The time was 5 pm - sure enough, assuming we started on time at 7 I still had an hour to finish and make it in under 11 hours. I had 10 and a half km to go. I pushed myself a bit and managed to take the pace up a little and started feeling a little better. Just stay at this pace until the turnaround. Then you’ll only have 7km to go and you can decide whether to go for it or not. The sun had gone now and the sunglasses came off as I ran through the dusk. I went around the turnaround with 38 minutes to run 7km - just under 5:30 per km pace. I can do this. I was feeling really good again - I don’t know if it was the salt on the peanuts or if I’d just found a bit of adrenaline that gave my system a kickstart but suddenly I could run properly again. I just focussed on each km, making sure I didn’t go too fast and kept the pace at a little over 5 minutes a km. The aid stations were like obstacle courses with plodding runners and walkers all over - I blew through them, grabbing the occasional cup of Gatorade and resisting the urge to shout “Out of my way slow people”. 7km became 6 and then 5 and I started pressing the pace. How can I suddenly feel so good after feeling so bad half an hour ago? Two kms to go and I put the hammer down as much as I could, taking the pace up into the 4.50s. Not fast for me but at the time it felt as though I was flying. I overtook two or three other people who were running hard, presumably all also racing the clock to get in before 11 hours. The turnaround in town is right by the left turn that takes you to the finish and the organisers had put a big spotlight at the turnaround shining down the road, so now I was running through the dark heading straight for the light. The last few hundred metres before the turnaround were clogged with people leaving only a metre wide strip to run down, which was occupied by slower moving runners. Because I’d been surprised by the start I was worried that the race might have started a couple of minutes before 7, so I wasn’t taking any chances by easing off. This meant that I had to dodge round 4 or 5 people but fortunately I didn’t knock any children or old people over or run full tilt into any nuns. Past the spotlight at the turnaround and I turned left into the brilliantly lit finishing chute and there was the clock reading 10:58:30. I slowed a little and finally crossed the line at 10:58:52. Job done.

Pizza and margaritas

Made splendid recovery nutrition - in particular the combination of salt (electrolytes), lime juice (carbs and vitamins) and tequila (ummm, tequila? Perhaps I should have asked for a shot of mescal with the worm for added protein) found in a margarita. I was planning to head back to the finish post-food but I fell asleep sitting up and decided it was more sensible to head for bed. Next day the talk was all of how tough a day it had been, and now if you look online the 2012 IM Cozumel seems to have entered the record books as One Of The Hardest IM Races Of All Time (one online race report tells the story of how the person in question HAD to draft in the wind because it was SO STRONG that NO-ONE could have made it through riding by themselves). I think this is an exaggeration - sure the swim was hard when everyone was expecting it to be easy, but although the winds on the bike were worse than expected it wasn’t like we were riding into a hurricane. I suspect that a lot of the hype is being generated by people who were expecting a much easier race and who hadn’t prepared properly. I trained expecting a hot, windy bike, that’s what I got and I coped. I went looking for a 10:30 but I ended up delighted with a 10:58 - overall this was one of the most satisfying races I’ve ever done.

Would I recommend IM Cozumel? Absolutely, especially if you like hot, windy, flat races (I do). The organisation is good, the swim is beautiful, the bike is lovely (in parts - the long straight that goes SW is a bit tedious) and more challenging than might be expected from the lack of hills and the run is good, with enough going on to keep you entertained. The locals seem to be all thoroughly lovely people and are absolutely behind the race and the island itself is, well, an island in the Caribbean with all that goes with that.

Midnight madness

The "Midnight Man" triathlon in Dartford - an ironman or half ironman distance race with a difference, starting at 6pm and running through the darkness, with a multi lap bike and run, the bike on a 10km (ish) loop and the run on a convoluted 7km (ish) loop. A low-budget and decidedly low-key event, with about 70 signed up for the half and 90 for the full. Having missed a couple of weeks worth of training due to illness and being a bit concerned about the looming spectre of IM Wales I decided not to taper for this race and trained right up to it, including a 40 minute threshold session on the bike the night before. Probably a mistake, that.

The weather Gods decided that we should be blessed with heat, and the day of the race was the hottest of the year so far. We very reluctantly climbed into our wetsuits and shuffled into the lake for the swim - with hindsight I think I'd have preferred to do the swim without the wetsuit but the organisers didn't really give us the option. Once in the water it was bearable and we assembled at the start line. Two laps  for the half distance and four for the full. Because the field was small it was a fairly civilised swim without too much aggro, and route finding was mostly easy except for a couple of parts where it wasn't 100% clear which of two visible buoys was the one to aim for. The water was patchy with some areas being nice and cool and others being like a warm bath. I was out and over the timing mat in 40 minutes, a bit slow but judging from some of the comments online it seems the swim was a bit long so nothing to worry about really. Wettie off, onto the bike and out of T1 for the 90km bike leg.

The race is based in a newly built science and technology park next to a big power station overlooked by the Dartford Crossing bridge, and the race organisers have managed to negotiate some sort of deal with the local council etc. to allow almost all the racing on closed roads, including a stretch that is one side of a dual carriageway. That's the good bit. The bad bit is that the section of the race that isn't on the dual carriageway features 14 speed bumps followed by about a km of road with traffic calming measures that consist of one side of the road being blocked off leaving a series of short sections of road about 2m wide to go through - effectively a set of narrow chicanes. This would be fine but it was an out-and-back section so there were bikes coming the other way at speed, and to make matters worse this section of the course was not closed to traffic and there were cars trying to get through these sections as well. Add two dead turns into the mix and it is not a bike course for a fast split. Still, I got my head down and was OK for the first couple of laps until I started feeling a bit dry. I had drunk the water I'd planned to put in my bike bottle before the race because it was so hot, thinking that with an aid station on each lap I'd be able to get a drink soon after starting. Unfortunately, because of a series of mishaps this didn't happen for a while. On the first lap I didn't expect the aid station to be where it was and I missed it. Lap 2 I was going too fast and fumbled the bottle hand off, and on lap 3 I spotted a guy at the end of the aid station who was holding a bottle, slowed right down and held my hand out and he looked at me as though I was some sort of idiot - he wasn't anything to do with the aid station, he was just holding a bottle for his mate. Great place to stand, buddy. Lap 4 I finally managed to get a bottle, which was good because it was still very hot and I'd been going for a couple of hours without a drink. Slurp, and then thump thump thump over the speed bumps, which were all big ones with cobbles on them to add to your enjoyment.

I wasn't feeling great but kept pushing the pace as much as I could and it slowly got dark - there was a good view over the Dartford marshes towards the end of the stretch on the dual carriageway and it was a nice sunset so that was nice. More drinks, more speedbumps. The main effect of the speedbump battering on my bike was that the front brake caliper came a bit loose and by about lap 5 every time I went over a bump it started rubbing and I had to reach down and move it back. The number of cars on the chicane stretch seemed to increase as the evening went on and there was some dodgy riding going on by people with, I guess, little in the way of imagination. Finally, and with much relief, I got to the last lap and enjoyed saying goodbye to the dead turns, the speed bumps and the chicanes. As I turned off the loop and headed back to transition I was profoundly grateful that I wasn't doing the full distance with 18 laps - there were 126 speedbumps on the half distance, so all the people doing the full distance would have 252 crunching bumps to get over. Bike split was 2:49, not as fast as I'd have liked but OK given the course and what was probably some fairly bad dehydration in the middle of it. Shoes on in T2, ran off, realised that my sunglasses, which were useful for about half the bike, were still hanging off my number belt, run back, gat rid of them and off into the darkness.

The run course was three laps which were meant to be 7km but were about 500m short each time. To say the route was convoluted is something of an understatement, and since it was not well signposted and featured about 2 marshalls who knew what was going on it resembled some sort of fiendish logic puzzle that the organisers had added to the race, a bit like those stories you hear from military special forces selection courses where they exercise them to exhaustion and then make them do maths or solve a Rubik's cube. I managed to work it all out, more by luck than advanced reasoning ability but a fair few of the people on the half distance race did not and a lot of people went astray - I understand that they got it sorted out for the full distance though, which is definitely A Good Thing; you really don't want to be confusing your runners when it's 3am and they're only just managing to stay upright. Speed-wise I was OK for a few kms, ticking them off at 4:30-4:40 pace but the lack of taper and late hour slowly caught up with me and I was down to 5 minutes plus per click fairly soon. The run was made less grim by the opportunity to shout at various people on the bike and by a small group of very vocal ladies who were cheering everyone on with apparently unlimited enthusiasm and volume - how they kept it up I do not know. There was also a lady who had pitched a tent by the run course and would occasionally poke her head out like a snail coming out of its shell and give some encouragement. The first time this happened I didn't realise where she was and got very confused about the strange voice from nowhere. 

It was still hot on the run despite being fully dark. There was one drinks table, but because of the aforementioned convolution of the run course you passed it three times per lap. There seemed to be only one or two people manning it and they weren't really on the ball, at least to start with - you had to stop and work out what was what, and they seemed to be concerned to stop the coke losing its fizz by only pouring it out in small batches and putting things on top of the cups. Not really what you want. I drank a fair amount of the coke despite the bubbles and chucked a lot of water over myself.

Eventually I got onto the last lap and kept plugging on. I was really knackered now but with the smell of the finish in my nostrils I was feeling cheery and tried to pick the pace up, which didn't really work and it was soon back to plodding. Round the lake for the last time and I finally hit the last piece of road and ran into the finish, run time about 1:40 I think and total time 5:14. Not bad, not as fast as I'd have liked but OK and definitely a good bit of training if nothing else. I ate a banana, had a splendid cup of coffee, got out of my slimy trisuit and into some proper clothes and hung around long enough to give Tim a big cheer - first off the bike for the full race and he went on to win. Nice one.

Fail tale

For your entertainment, here’s the tale of my epic fail while travelling to the 2012 Alpe d’Huez Triathlon. The plan was simple: on Monday morning get the Eurostar to Paris, then the TGV to Grenoble, pick up a hire car and drive to Alpe d’Huez, spend a day eating baguettes and then the next day doing the race, then back to the UK on the Thursday. Previous experience told me that taking a bike on the Eurostar is difficult because you have to check it in specially and the last time I tried this the staff at the bike check in were so dilatory that I almost missed the train. I therefore borrowed a hard bike case from the club, packed my new Bianchi into it, everything else in a rucksack and headed off.

All went well until I got to King’s Cross, where I noticed that one of the wheels on the bike case had broken. This meant that instead of rolling along it was just scraping on the floor. Since the whole thing weighed almost 25kg there was no way I could carry it, so I just had to drag it through the miles of passages that take you to the Eurostar terminal. There were trolleys at the terminal, though, so when I'd got one of them things were easy and the trip to the Gare du Nord was pleasant and largely incident free. So far so good.

Once there, however, an obstacle presented itself: I had to get to the Gare de Lyon with my giant heavy one-wheeled bike case, and I only had 50 minutes to do it. It’s just a few km and an easy journey on the Metro, but not with a giant heavy box that you have to drag along the floor. No way am I going on the Metro with that, thought I, I’ll just get a taxi. This proved to be an error. To start with, the taxi drivers simply refused to take me because the case was too big. I’m not sure why it was too big, it goes quite easily in the average estate car, but I spent about 10 minutes enjoying a repertoire of shrugs, face-pulling and in some cases downright rudeness. Eventually I found a taxi driver who would take me, loaded up his cab and off we went, straight into complete gridlock. The driver seemed more concerned with changing lanes as often as humanly possible than with getting me to the station. I anxiously watched the time and tried to hurry things along but Monsieur le Taxi was not to be rushed. The taxi rank at the Gare de Lyon was chaos and he spent about 5 minutes trying to find a space, and when he did he got out and started shouting at another driver who’d cut him up, rather than taking the money I needed to give him so that I could get on with things. 7 minutes left.

Dragging the Box of Doom behind me I ran into the station. Found the departure board. There it is: platform 21. Onto the station concourse I ran. I looked for platform 21, but something was wrong... all the platforms had letters, not numbers. I looked back at the departure board: yes, platform 21 for the TGV to Grenoble, but all the other trains had letters, not numbers. I looked around and eventually saw a sign to platforms 5-23, and off I ran, dragging my box and scattering dogs, women and small children in my wake. 5 minutes.

I made my way down the corridor indicated by the sign, heart rate hitting the 180s, and round the corner into… the ticket hall. Which is big, full of people in queues and has no train platforms. Not even any with letters. Sweat dripping into my eyes I looked around and eventually found another sign directing me ne the other side of the ticket hall, so off I ran again, the juggernaut of desolation that was the bike box scraping along the stone floor behind me, crashing through the queues, pushing pregnant women aside and kicking nuns, small children and kittens out of the way. 4 minutes.

Past the sign, and out into another station concourse, with numbers instead of letters this time. There is platform 21 in front of me. I put the hammer down and with 3 minutes to go I was on the platform. The train was there, and the doors were open. I could see the finish line and as I launched my final sprint I could hear a choir launching into the Halleluja Chorus. Confetti cannons were firing, cheerleaders were waving their pompoms and the announcer was going crazy… until SNCF woman, 5’4” in her spike heels and featuring a particularly chic coiffure stepped out between me and the promised land.

“Votre billet monsieur”.

Christ, where’s my ticket? In my rucksack. I shrugged it off, dived into the top pocket, grabbed the ticket and gave it to her. She took a loooong, slow look at it. “Ce n’est pas correct, m’sieur”. Oh *****, I’ve given her the return half. Back into the rucksack to get the other part of the ticket. She slowly took it from me and slowly, unsmilingly, carefully examined it… until the train doors sniiiicked closed. She smiled at last and gave me the ticket back. “Vous êtes trop tard”. I pointed out that there were still 2 minutes, but my pleas fell on deaf ears. It was made quite clear that even if I were Napoleon reincarnated, accompanied by the ghosts of Jeanne d'Arc and Charles de Gaulle there’s no way I’d get on the train now. I slowly sank to the floor by the Giant Bike Box Whose Name Is Calamity. SNCF woman paid me no more regard than any of the other pieces of litter scattered on the floor. Merde.

OK, what now. I went back to the ticket office, ignored the scattered bodies left by my previous passing and, after a while in a queue, determined that a) the next train or Grenoble doesn’t leave for 3 hours, b) No I couldn’t use my ticket on it and c) I couldn't get a new ticket anyway because all the seats were booked (at least I think that’s the reason, my not very good French was breaking down somewhat by this point). OK, what other options are there? I got the phone out, shelled out some money for international data access and found that not only am I not getting the train to Grenoble that day, I’m also not flying unless I wanted to do some very serious damage to my credit card. There was, however, a seat available on an Easyjet flight back to London for an amount of money that is only eye-wateringly painful. Tossing up the relative merits of finding a hotel room (all the while accompanied by the Great Big Box of Desolation) and flying back to London I was suddenly filled with an urge to just go home, and have a beer, and not have to drag this stupid, heavy box around any more Parisian train stations. So I did.

Don't believe the marketing droids

I have long been of the opinion that the majority of claims made about the very expensive nutritional and other products that are pushed at you in a massive variety of ways by the food and drink industry are based on either no evidence or very poor evidence. I'm pleased to say that the British Medical Journal now agrees with me and has published a series of papers where they examine the claims made for a variety of nutritional and other products and find them seriously wanting.

BBC News article here

Blog post from a doctor who works in weight control here

BMJ editorial here (long but absolutely damning)


Remember: these companies are selling products with massive markups, for example maltodextrin from myprotein.com costs £12.99 for 5 kg, PSP22 (which is nothing but maltoextrin and flavour, although SIS claim it's "special" maltodextrin) is £8.50 for half a kilo. They market them in a variety of cunning ways: paying athletes to endorse them (remember that just because someone's a professional athlete it doesn't mean they have any morals or an IQ greater than 25 http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/12/tour-de-france-remy-digregorio), sponsoring races so that you're given their product during the event,  "social" marketing via facebook and twitter (getting people who aren't employed by their company to endorse them) and targetting top age-groupers with free samples in the hope that they'll endorse their product. These things are usually backed up with impressive sounding "sciencey" claims that are usually based on very weak evidence.

Here's an example of the sort of claims they make. Note that they claim very solid scientific support, with links to technical scientific publications. Must work, right? Someone from my club contacted me and asked my opinion as a professional scientist of their evidence. I had a look and this was my reply.

"Briefly, very little of any consequence there. The "publication" is a 1-page published conference proceeding, so nothing approaching a proper research paper. Not clear if it's been peer-reviewed. The sample size is small. The stats are unsuitable for the design (should have used a mixed-effects model). The analysis is not reported properly (no F-statistic or degrees of freedom for the ANOVA, no indication what the error bars on the graphs are). Assuming the stats *are* appropriate, the p-value for the ANOVA for lactate at pmax is 0.049 so it juuuuust scrapes into statistical significance. More importantly, the specific comparison between pmax for placebo and treatment is non-significant on the Tukey test (p=0.062). This means that there is a suggestion that there is an effect on lactate but it's not really possible to draw much of a conclusion - hardly the "off the scale" response the marketing suggests. Even more important than that, ***they don't even report the data for actual performance*** - if they had data indicating (for example) higher wattage at AT or higher endurance for the treatment group you can bet they'd have included it. My conclusion from reading this is that it indicates a possible but very badly supported effect on lactate at exhaustion only (not at the other times they tested) and nothing else. Bear in mind that it's become clear that lactate is only a small part of the biology of fatigue, and is possibly even unrelated to it, so a product which claims to buffer pH changes because of lactate can only have a small effect at best."

That's quite technical in parts, but I think you get the message. This piece of research tells us nothing about whether it works in the manner claimed or not. People might swear blind to you that it makes a difference to them, but bear in mind that we are terrible at making such assessments about our own health and performance - there are also people who will tell you with complete conviction that the zaniest forms of alternative therapy cured their health problems, and just take a look at all those cyclists in the Tour de France making themselves look silly with breath-rite strips on their noses, a product that was shown years ago to have no effect on performance at all.

Back to basics

The eventual winner (I think) going round one of the hairpins on Boxhill

I’ve always wanted to do the Ballbuster Duathlon. It’s got a very simple format: run a lap of an 12.5 km loop starting at the top of Boxhill in Surrey, then bike it three times and then run it again. The total amount of descent and ascent is about 165m per lap, with the ascent almost all coming in the climb up the zigzag road to the top of the hill at the end of each lap. They run the race twice a year, in the Autumn and in the Spring, but I’d never got it together to do the race before. I have to admit that a few years ago I entered, got up early on the Sunday morning, put on my gear, put the bike in the car and then checked the website to find out exactly where the start was and found out that the race is held on a Saturday.

No such errors this year although my preparation was far from ideal, including a 5km race the previous Saturday, a half marathon the next day and a 20 mile training run during the week, so my legs were pretty tired. Adding almost no bike training for a while (just a few sessions on the trainer) into the mix and my race plan was to go at a reasonable pace on the runs and just take it easy on the bike and try not to fall off. The forecast was for fog and rain, so I packed a variety of gear but decided to go for the “Helly Hansen thermal top with a tri-suit over the top” combination, a timeless fashion classic. Got there in good time, had a coffee from the National Trust café and racked my bike in the fog. Nice to see a bunch of guys from Thames Turbo there.

Quick race briefing and we were off. The loop kicks off with a fairly level but undulating few kms through the village of Boxhill, then downhill to a sharp left, after which it’s mostly downhill, some on small twisty roads without much view of what’s coming towards you until you hit the bottom of the big climb, which is just a matter of slogging all the way back up to the top. The first run was fine, I was through 10ks in about 38 minutes despite my legs being a bit stiff and tired after the previous weeks’ activities. Onto the hill and I just slowed down to a steady pace and ground my way up. Final time for the first lap was 50:50 for an average pace of 4:05 per km, not desperately fast but nothing to worry about.

The bike wasn’t fabulous but wasn’t too bad either. My ****ing saddle came loose again on the first lap and I had to stop to fix it at the top of the hill. The rather technical descents got more troublesome as the race went on and by the third lap it was raining quite hard and I had to slow down because I couldn’t really see too much and it was getting a bit scary. Then onto the hill for the third time up and I just put it in the easiest gear and span my way up. I collected a cyclist who wasn’t part of the race who latched onto my back wheel and stuck there like a leech the whole way up, which was really a bit annoying but obviously I got rid of him when I turned left into transition again. Final time for the bike was 1:27, not exactly fast but not too much to worry about again. There was a short run over some really stony, muddy ground before you could get the the bike racks which was no fun at all in cleats. At least I didn’t take my feet out of the shoes before T2, that would have been an error.

T2 took a bit longer than T1 because my hands were cold but soon enough I was back out running again. Ouch! Curiously I was unable to run as fast as previously and my legs were not in their happy place. Through the fog I could just see another TTTC trisuit in the distance and I slowly reeled John in, finally catching him somewhere in the village. The downhill sections were interesting: my quads were very unhappy and I couldn’t manage to roll downwards like I would on fresher legs. Finally to the bottom of the zigzag climb for the fifth and last time and there weren’t many people around. Once I got on the hill I could see a few people up ahead, one of whom was obviously in trouble and kept stopping to walk. I want past him quickly enough and then got passed by someone else who’d stopped to answer a call of nature. He went past me quite fast but I kept on plodding and came back up to him and passed him on one of the hairpins. He tried to stay with me and I turned the screw a bit and after about half a minute he faded off into the distance. It’s like normal racing but in slow motion because everyone’s totally knackered and running very slowly up a big hill. I overtook a few more runners and was enjoying feeling that I was finishing quite strongly when I realised that someone was closing on me: I had to dig quite deep to put on a bit of a burst but that was enough to get me to the finish, once I’d worked out where the finish line actually was. Final time was 3:18 which was good enough for 51^st place out of 300-odd finisher. The last lap was 5 minutes slower than the first.

Me, suffering in the last few hundred metres of the race.
The person behind in the white top was trying to catch me and
it was a bit of an effort to hold him off.

I have to say, I loved this race. It’s got a combination of complete stupidity (let’s go round and round this really hilly loop) and basic grittiness that I like a lot. No-one does this race who isn’t a serious competitor, no-one (or hardly anyone) is trying to raise money for charity and there aren’t any girls with pompoms, bands, big screens, balloons or carpets in the transition area. There aren’t any big crowds, you don’t even get a finishers’ medal and the athletes are expected to know what they’re doing and be reasonably self-sufficient. More please.

"A life without limits": review.

One hundred and forty words. That’s all it takes for the G-word to appear, in the third sentence of the second paragraph of the foreword of Chrissie Wellington’s new autobiography, “A life without limits”. For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, there is a fundamental law of the universe that states that any coverage of long-distance triathlon in the popular media must, somewhere, use the adjective “gruelling” to describe the event. Multiple Ironman triathlon world champion Chrissie Wellington might be able to defy illness and injury, she might be able to ride her bike like a bolt of lightning through the Hawaiian heat and humidity and then follow it up by running a marathon at sub-2:50 pace, but this is one rule that she dares not break. A good choice, then, to drop it in as close to the beginning of her autobiography as possible, ensuring that the triathlon gods are appeased, and then not to use it again, allowing a focus on more interesting matters.

Wellington has not had anything approaching a normal athletic career, and this is therefore, thankfully, not a normal sportsperson’s autobiography. Following a geography degree at Birmingham University and a masters’ in international development she went on to work for DEFRA, a British government department, where she was involved in development work and in negotiations and drafting policy on overseas aid. Disillusioned by the lack of connection between besuited civil servants jetting around the World to negotiate in luxury hotels and the realities of life for the people that the aid was meant to be helping she took some time out and went to Nepal to work for an NGO in Nepal, trying to improve sanitation in rural parts of the country. While there she took up mountain biking and went on a series of long distance rides with friends. Disillusioned once again by certain aspects of her work she spent some time travelling, and on a whim entered a coast-to-coast running, kayaking and cycling race in New Zealand where she finished a surprised second. Realising that she had the ability to do very well indeed in long multisport events, and fed up with her inability to achieve what she wanted working in development, she walked away from development and into the life of a professional triathlete.

Wellington’s time working in government has thankfully not afflicted her with bureaucratese or MBAspeke and the book is written in an enjoyable and easy to read style, although most of the sentences tend to be quite short making it a bit staccato to read and encouraging the reader to rush through it. Nonetheless it’s several intellectual notches above a great deal of the sports literature: not many footballers use words like “apotheosis”, for example. There is some nice understated dry humour and a running joke about her tendency to hoard everything. Lots of sports autobiographies are ghost written to a greater of lesser extent, and I don’t know whether any of this has been ghosted but I suspect that most or all of it is straight from the World Champion’s desk – as evidence I cite the repeated use of the adjective “suboptimal”, which I also recall her using while speaking the other day (edit: turns out it was ghost written. Oh well.).

The early part of the book unsurprisingly deals with her early years. She talks openly about her problems with body image and easting disorders as a young woman, and interestingly about how sport has helped her to come to terms with these as she has come to regard her body more as a system that enables her to do her job. She characterises herself as a “control freak” and an obsessive hard worker and that she is correct is evident from her achievements in her life before triathlon. At university she was awarded a first class degree and a masters with distinction and from what she says she was rocketing up the ladder in the civil service, writing policy, negotiating with representatives of other governments and on one occasion drinking too many margheritas with the minister. The move into triathlon comes next and for me this is the most interesting part of the book. She began her career being coached by the controversial Australian Brett Sutton, and her relationship with him forms a thread that runs through the rest of the book. He clearly made a massive impact on her and her descriptions of his attitudes, training techniques and personality is fascinating. Sutton demands absolute obedience from his athletes and for an intelligent, free-spirited young woman to go from a high-flying and responsible civil service job to submitting to Sutton’s instructions sounds like a painful process. Some of what she describes would certainly not stand up to feminist analysis, especially the part where he basically tells her that she'll never be complete without a man, but this doesn't seem to have caused offence and Wellington seems to have accepted it as being meant with the best of intentions.

Her dazzling rise to the top of the sport is well known and I’ve watched a lot of coverage of Wellington racing over the years, but it’s still interesting to read about how it felt from her point of view. The description of the first Kona win, when she was a complete unknown and astonished everyone is great to read, especially her description of it as “something that… was going to have major repercussions”, but the most riveting bit for me was the discussion of the 2011 Kona race when she was seriously hurt in a bike crash two weeks before the race and still managed to win despite assorted bruising, missing skin and a torn pectoral. Much of the detail of how badly she was hurt has only come out in bits after the event. Having read the full story I am astounded that she even started, let alone won.

I wasn’t planning to read this book because, as I’ve commented elsewhere, I was a little suspicious of Wellington’s public persona and in particular what I saw as her habit of talking like an aspirational speaker at a corporate event the whole time. I realised my mistake when I saw her speak at a Q&A session a week ago and was greatly impressed, and this book has only reinforced my positive impression. It’s a frank portrait of someone who has done some truly astonishing things, who hasn’t been afraid to make momentous changes to her life and who has worked hard to get where she is today.

One thing that I thought was missing was any real discussion of what it is that makes her such a phenomenal athlete. She is not simply much better than all the other women in her sport, she is far, far better than them and could probably make a decent career as a professional male triathlete. I would love to know her thoughts on why this should be: how much is the consequence of physiology and how much psychology? From some of the things she writes about the mental aspect of racing I suspect that she might well be familiar with Tim Noakes’ central governor theory of performance, which is the idea that our brains are the ultimate limiters of performance because they are programmed to stop us pushing our bodies to the point where we damage them. It’s a shame that she didn’t expand on that further, but you can't have everything.

A final question that I was left with is how well she is going to achieve her ultimate aim: she has always said that she is fundamentally motivated by a desire to make the World a better place. For someone disillusioned with government and NGO aid for developing nations, the narcissistic and individualistic world of Triathlon, populated by over-achievers from socio-economic group A is not an obvious destination. The plan seems to be to use her fame to publicise causes that matter to her, and she’s certainly been doing this to a certain extent with work with the Blazeman foundation and the Jane Tomlinson Appeal, but I suspect she has much bigger plans. I’ll be interested to find out what comes next, especially given her plans to take a sabbatical from racing for a year. 

TCR show

I had a few hours spare today and I spent them at the annual TCR (Triathlon, Cycling, Running) show at Sandown park, which is fortunately only a 10 minute drive from my house. This is a big triathlon exhibition, with lots of trade stands and also various things going on: a 10k race, swim analysis in some endless pools and seminars upstairs. To be honest, I found the trade stands depressing. There seemed to be an endless number of people all producing one of about three different products (nutrition, wetsuits, compression tights) and all making more and more ridiculous claims to differentiate themselves from the competition. The worst of these come from the sports nutrition companies. Sports nutrition is not, really, a complicated business for most people, so because these firms all produce essentially the same products they all use as much "sciencey" jargon as possible to make their products sound better than they are. Gu carbohydrate gels, for example, contain amino acids for faster recovery and an immune system boost. Really? Ingesting a small amount of protein during an event helps the immune system? I must admit, I'm not aware of any science that would demonstrate that... and part of my research is on effects of diet on immune responses.

There were also lots of companies trying to extract money from people by providing services of questionable value. I can understand why swim coaching is big business, but run technique coaching? Most people would benefit much more from a decent structured training schedule that they can get easily from a book or from a club coach (again, it's not complicated) than from someone poncing around with their technique. The world of triathlon seems to be full of people looking to exchange money for speed without doing any hard work, which is not really something that I have a lot of time for. I'd rather get free speed without spending any money or doing any hard work, and the only way I can think of for that is to go back in time and select my parents a little bit better (not that there's anything wrong with my current set of genes but a little tweaking wouldn't hurt).

On the bright side, I went to two seminars which were both excellent. Paul Newsome from Swimsmooth gave a really good talk about swimming (unsurprisingly) and made some really good points: the best stroke for open water swimming is not necessarily the same as the best stroke for pool swimming, and different strokes work for different folks. This was all illustrated with a great series of videos of different swimmers above and below water - the contrast between, for example, Rebecca Adlington, middle distance pool supremo and multiple Olympic gold medallist and Jodie Swallow, one of the best open water swimmers in triathlon was a real eye-opener. That there isn't a single perfect stroke is really refreshing to hear and I got the impression that the Swimsmooth guys know their stuff and do a lot of very good thinking about it as well.

Chrissie Wellington was someone that I was sort of looking forward to and sort of not - my impression of her up until now was that she only spoke in MBA approved aspirational phrases, so while I'm the first to acknowledge that she is a mind-blowing athlete and undoubtedly as hard as nails I was a bit concerned that the talk would be a bit too much hyperbole and not enough detail or insight. I'm pleased to say that I couldn't have been more wrong. I was seriously impressed: she's honest, self-effacing, fair and obviously very intelligent. Yes, there's a lot of phrases like "never give up", "self-empowerment", "mind training" and so on but it quickly becomes clear ***when you hear the whole story and not just the soundbites*** that in her case these are not just empty words. She means it and what's more in her case they're correct. I guess I've been driven to cynicism by overexposure to university management who are possibly the Chrissie W anti-particle: the bullshiton to her honeston. It's possible that by bringing them together we could produce enough clean energy to power the world for decades, but given that she's spent time in the civil service I expect that similar experiments have already been tried. The story of how badly injured she was before the IM World Champs in Hawaii last year and how she raced through the pain and won has to be one of the great stories of our sport. Great answers to all the questions: I asked the only dumb one which was why she never wears an aero helmet - there's always some idiot sounding off on Slowtwitch or Tritalk about how she must be a bit of a thicky because she wears a road helmet so I thought I'd get the answer straight from the World Champion's mouth. I got the impression she's been asked this before but really, just a simple "my head gets too hot" would have been fine.

Knackered of Tunbridge Wells

The Tunbridge Wells half is a tough, hilly half marathon that takes place in late February. Way back in the early noughties I ran it three times, each time as prep for a spring marathon, with times between 1:22 and 1:27 and a 23rd place when I managed that 1:22. This year I'm entered for the Barcelona marathon in late March, and so I found myself lining up for my first proper running road race since 2005. Because I missed a few weeks with an injury I trained right up to the race and foolishly ran an 18:20 5km in Bushy Park the previous morning so I was a bit tired to start with: coupled with not having done something like this for a while I had no idea what sort of time I was likely to do.

I got there in good time, mooched over to the start to get a coffee and realised that I had no cash at all apart form a few foreign notes that were kicking around in my wallet. Fortunately the man selling the coffees was willing to exchange a double espresso for a five euro note so I managed to get my fix. A little bit of stretching and I lined up at the front of the 2100 competitors and some bloke started talking to the assembled runners, including a strangely convoluted description of the course as something like "challenging, hilly yet reasonably fast" - you can't have your cake and eat it mate, it's either hilly or it's fast, and this course is hilly. The race was started by none other than local Olympic golden girl Kelly Holmes and as a sign of the times the start was slightly delayed while she took a picture for twitter. Here it is: I'm about 4 rows back wearing my bad-taste orange Oakleys.

After the twitter-fest we were off. Tunbridge Wells is on the Weald of Kent, a series of low hills, and the river Medway forms a valley next to it. The race heads Northwest out of town, drops into the valley after about 5km and then climbs back up in the second half, so it can be divided up into a series of distinct sections.

The first 4km or so are in rolling hills, with some fast downhills and some short sharp climbs. There is then a series of long downhills from about 5km to 9km, followed by the two big climbs, the first, in Penshurst, being shorter than Spring Hill, the second, which is hard and a couple of kms long, topped off with a long false flat. From 14km to 19 or so there is a series of false flats and rolling hills that are quite tough to maintain pace on, then the last couple of kms into town are mostly slightly downhill and a bit faster.

I didn't really have a plan, since I didn't have much feeling for what sort of shape I was in, but I had what you could call a vague feeling that the best thing to do would be to try to gain plenty of time in the first 10km because the second half was going to be hard. For the first km I just ran at a comfortable speed and was surprised to split it in 3:38 (downhill). The next one had some significant uphills and that went in 4:01, and then it was all comfortably under 4 minutes a km until km 10, including one at 3:34 which included a steep 11% downhill grade. I was through 10km in 38 minutes and some change, then it was onto the completely different second half which is mostly just a case of suffering through. The km splits grew and going up spring Hill I managed km 12 in the miserable time of 5:24. Not many people overtook me, though and I guess most people were in the same boat. My expensive sunglasses kept on fogging up but I didn't really mind because I didn't really want to see what was coming.

Finally over the top of the big hill and things were hurting a bit and I was not sure if I could keep a reasonable pace to the finish. I just kept on plugging away and managed to keep things at somewhere near 4 minute per km pace for the stretch from 13 to 20 mms, with a few deviations when it all got a bit much. Two little girls were counting the runners at about 15kms and seemingly having a great time (is this the solution to the nations numeracy problems?) and I found out that I was in 49th place, which was better than I expected. The last few kms were than just a matter of holding it together and I managed to dig up some speed from somewhere for the last stretch into town, then into the finish, didn't trip over any of the speed bumps and finish in 1:25:44, 53rd place. Kelly H gave me my medal: I wanted to tell her how her 800m race in Athens is one of my all-time favourite sports moments but I couldn't because I had no breath left. I did notice that she's a bit shorter than I would have expected - for some reason I expect all olympic medallists to be at least seven feet tall, rather than about five eight.

Overall not a bad race for me at all, I think, especially given the complete lack of any sort of taper. Obviously I had a big positive split with the second half several minutes slower than the first but that's mostly a consequence of the terrain and I was still running well at the end, although it was pretty tough for the last 5kms or so. The last time I did this race it was OK but nothing special in terms of organisation, but they've made some big improvements and it's got a good "big race" feel with bands applying along the route, great traffic management and everything running smoothly. Next up the Ballbuster Duathlon.