Challenge Henley race report

After a summer of fail, in which I missed Roth because of excess work and then failed to reach the start of my proxy, the Midnight Man, because someone drove a mobile crane into a lane divider on the M25 causing me to spend 3 and a half hours in a traffic jam on my way to Dartford, I received a phone call from Richard “Mr Fixit” Gower asking if I wanted a freebie place at Challenge Henley. Foolishly, I agreed, and since it seems that even I couldn't mess up three times in a row I ended up on Sunday morning at 6AM inserting myself into my wetsuit in the chilly fog by the Thames. After a few minutes pfaffing the organisers announced that the start would be delayed by 10 minutes because of the fog: I have no idea what they thought was going to happen in 10 minutes but after the delay the visibility was exactly what it had been before. No more time for messing around though and we got in the water which was a relief because although it was cold (16 degrees) it was not as cold as the air.

The race start was a civilised affair, with only about 200 people in our wave there was plenty of room and not much in the way of fisticuffs. My world went grey-green-grey-green-sight! Grey-green-grey-green-grey-green-sight! for a good long time as I went from green water to grey fog whenever I breathed. The buoys were a fair distance apart and it was often hard to know where you were. I picked up several pairs of feet but the owners seemed to be even less oriented than me. We finally went around the turn and started back downstream. Sighting was even harder now since we were in the middle of the river and it really was qute difficult to stay on track. I had a head-on with a lady from one of the half-distance waves who was part of a group that was way off course: I told her politely that she was a bit away from where she should be and she showed herself to be a true triathlete by snapping “No I'm not” straight back at me. Shrug, back to the grey-green-grey-green.

The Business School slowly appeared through the fog and I got to the swim finish in 1:19, a bit slow but given the sighting problems not much of a surprise. My Garmin has the swim as 4.2km but since it also thinks I swam across the towpath at one point I won't set too much credence by that. Onto the bike after a slowish transition (mostly because I really had to pay a visit to the portaloos) and I rode off into the fog. There are a few kms of rolling road parallel to the river and then you turn right at a rounabout and start the climbing. I span my way up the first climb to Nettlebed, but as I turned left off the climb and onto what would be a beautifully fast shallow downhill if the road surface were better I noticed my left foot seemed to be wobbling around more than it should be. I looked down and my crank was hanging loose off the spindle: my bike was falling to pieces (NB I have ridden thousands of kms on this bike in training and the crank has never fallen off before). I stopped and put it all back together again and tightened every Allen bolt on the chainset to somewhere above the recommended torque. Back on the bike and to the first turnaround, spin back up the hill, down to the next turnaround, spin back up again, then down the last hill of the lap, the evil Howe Hill, which is a 70+ kph descent on a fairly narrow, winding road with (surprise!) a shocking surface, then a dead turn at the bottom and straight back up. Lovely.

Once you're over Howe Hill there's a nice fast descent back down to the Henley roundabout, and your first lap is over. I snagged a bottle from the aid station at the bottom of the hill (great place to put it...). It was some pink concoction that tasted of almonds. What? I just drank it anyway, not considering that perhaps it wasn't meant to taste of almonds, and carried on my way. On the way back up to Nettlebed on the second lap I noticed that my flat kit was rattling around ominously. It was all stuffed into a sawn-off bidon, with a bit of gaffa tape over the top. I had a look and the gaffa tape was gone and so was one of my spare tubes, and everything else was rattling around and not liable to stay put for long. I use this for my flat kit a lot and it's never come apart before...

I stopped and stuffed it all back in, using the spare tube to hopefully hold my multi tool and pump in place. Back on up the hill and it was OK until the turn, where the poor road surface made short work of it. Two more stops and I realised that it wasn't going to stay put, and since I was feeling considerable anxiety at the prospect of my crank falling off again I didn't want to lose anything. I ended up putting the multi tool and tube in the bidon that had had my dodgy pink drink, and stuffing the pump into my trisuit. Incidentally, as I put it in the bidon I noticed that the multitool was falling to pieces because one of the bolts holding it togther had come undone. I've had that tool for about 8 years and it's never come apart before... By now the dodgy pink drink seemed to be having an effect and I was feeling queasy as well. The rest of the lap was a bit miserable, with the combination of endless slogging up hills and shocking road surfaces, then on the descent of Howe Hill I spotted my spare tube by the road – the rattlefest of the descent must have been what shook it all to pieces the first time. Back up Howe Hill and I'm pleased to report that the “autopause” on my Garmin went on as I went up the steepest bit: I was going so slowly that it thought I'd stopped.

Lap 3 and I thought I'd check the distance so far on my Garmin. I was surprised to find that it thought I'd gone no distance on the bike at all, even though it was giving me speed and time elapsed. It's a new one but I'd tested it out severeal times before the race and it'd never done that before (turns out it was a known bug with the 2.7 firmware- nice one Garmin for selling it anyway without either fixing it or warning the buyer...). By now I was starting to feel the distance and was still experiencing mild GI distress so I decided to take it easy and try to save something for the run. Back round the lap for the last time, up the long slow slogs and down the short descents, feeling every vibration from the decaying chipseal that seems to be de rigeur in the Chilterns. No wonder they all drive 4x4s. Finally back to Howe Hill, which had several people walking their bikes this time, including one guy with a disk wheel  . This time the autopause on my Garmin went off four times as I ground my way up. Once I was at the top I had a bit of a morale boost since it really was all downhill from there and I actually enjoyed the zoom back down to Henley and T2. Final bike time was 6.31. I was caught unawares by how hard the bike course was: the changes made to it since the previous time I did the race made the total amount of ascent up to just over 1900m. Quite a lot of that was on long, slow uphill grinds and the bits where you might otherwise go fast mostly had really bad road surfaces. Add three dead turns per lap, a bottle of poisoned drink (hey, it tasted of almonds, and we know what they taste of) and the need to put my cranks back together and it's really a bit of a surprise that I finished at all.

Into T2 and a nice person took my bike away, a brief period of dithering in the changing tent and off I trotted. Straight away I realised that I really was not feeling at all good and was quite spaced out and very low on fuel, so when I got to the aid station by Henley bridge I made a point of walking through and guzzling a load of coke (I didn't want to be poisoned by the USN drink again, so I just stuck to coke for the rest of the race). I was also having fierce salt cravings which I addressed with a handful of crisps. Adam Burke was lurking around just after the station and I guess I must have looked bad because he seemed quite worried about me. Onwards I trotted and started to feel better as the coke and crisps worked my way through my system until about 3km into the run I felt something under the ball of my right foot- I thought it was a stone at first and stopped to take it out but it turned out to be a 1” screw that had gone through the sole at an angle. The sharp end was pressing on my foot but by a miracle it hadn't actually gone in. I tried to pull it out but it obviously wasn't going anywhere. Interesting. I don't know how many thousand kms I've run in my life and I've never had a screw, or a nail, or any other pointed fastening device, through my shoe before. Hmmmm. Not much to do but keep going so I put the shoe back on and carried on running, albeit with a strangely altered gait as I was forced to run on the outside of my right foot. I did that for most of the rest of the first lap until I saw Brian Hood near the bridge. I was hoping that Mr Engineer would have a Swiss Army Knife or similar so we could get it out with a screwdriver, but no – fortunately a bystander thought he could prise it out with his keys and after several minutes of tugging and pulling he managed to get the offending item out.

I felt a lot better once I could run properly and virtually skipped round the next lap despite the rain which had been threatening for a while and was now coming down quite hard. By lap three I was starting to feel the length of the day but I kept on going with a little walk at each aid station, and halfway through it the rain stopped which was a bit of a bonus. Onto the fourth and final lap I was just wasted and struggling to keep any sort of pace up. I had a few walk breaks and finally things came back up as I hit the towpath again heading for Henley bridge, with maybe three kms left. I just chucked it all in and ran hard back over the bridge, into the finish area at Phyllis Court and finally over the line for an 11.56 finish. That's almost an hour and twenty minutes slower than my PB but given that the whole day was just a series of problems with short periods of triathlon between them I'm not complaining.

Overall, top marks for the organisation and the excellent volunteers. Not many marks for the tough bike course, mainly because of the bad road surfaces which made it quite unpleasant. The organisers were advertising it as faster than the old one – I don't know what they were smoking when they came up with that but I want some. Top marks also for the soup in the finishers' tent. Big thanks to Richard for getting me the entry, and also thanks to Brian, Richard, Adam and Alan for turning out and giving me some support right when I needed it the most – much appreciated gents.

Finally, a joke. It's very funny. Brian laughed a LOT when I told him after the race.

Lots of triathletes stop on the run because of a bonk: but I'm the only one who's stopped for a screw.

Boom Boom!