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!

Rob vs the relay

NB this is a report I wrote for my departmental newsletter, so it's coming from a different perspective than some of the other stuff here.

What you look like after doing two IM races in 4 weeks

Rob vs the relay, or how I learnt to stop worrying and love the pain

Way back in the dim and distant (that’ll be 1978) a group of people had an argument in a pub in Hawaii about whether swimmers, cyclists or runners were the fittest. One of them organised a race to decide: he called it by the modest name of the “Ironman” and advertised it with the slogan “Swim 2.4 miles! Bike 112 miles! Run 26.2 miles! Brag for the rest of your life!”. Back to the present and the ironman distance has become the standard long-distance triathlon format, with quite a few thousand people completing one every year. I completed my sixth in August of this year, finishing the Challenge Copenhagen race in a time of 10 hours and 37 minutes, which I was well pleased with. I have had problems in the past with getting injured or sick before races, and I’d put in an entry to another race in Henley on Thames, 5 weeks after the Copenhagen one, just in case I wasn’t able to do the latter, and also, I have to admit, because I wanted to see if I could do two in the space of just over a month.

Not long after the Copenhagen race a bunch of the guys from my club decided they were also going to do the Henley race as a relay (one person swims, one bikes, one runs) to raise funds for a charity called 21 and co which provides support for children with Down’s syndrome and their parents in SW London. One of them, Brian, has a daughter called Blythe who has Downs, and who regularly comes along to our races and gives enthusiastic support. I wanted to help out but I didn’t particularly want to ask people to sponsor me to do something I’d do anyway, even something as dumb as a long-distance triathlon. Thus was born the idea of me versus the relay team: I would race against them, but with me doing all three disciplines myself, and people could predict what they thought the difference between our times would be.

I got my head down and put some hard training in in the weeks between the Copenhagen race and the Henley one. I was feeling good and thought that I had a fair chance of beating them: I’m a faster swimmer than Rich (their swimmer) and a faster runner than Brian (Blythe’s dad and the runner for the relay) and on a good day I can bike with Nigel (their cyclist), plus the hilly bike course should suit my skinny build over Nigel’s more muscular physique. The two questions I didn’t know the answer to were how well I’d recovered from the Copenhagen race and whether an injury to my left quad that I’d picked up a couple of weeks before the race would cause any trouble.

Thus it came to be that at 6.30 AM on Sunday 18^th September I was standing in the freezing cold in a field next to the Thames, watching the mist rise from the Thames. The organisers delayed the start by 10 minutes because of the visibility but it didn’t get any better, so they started us anyway. There’s no better way to kick off a day’s long-distance racing than with an open water swim start: take a few hundred nervous testosterone-addled triathletes (including the women) all treading water and then have them suddenly start swimming front crawl and there’s inevitably a period of full contact until everyone gets decently spread out.

The swim was 1900m upstream by the North bank of the river, followed by 1900m back downstream in the middle of the channel. It wasn’t easy, mainly because it was still fairly dark when we started, visibility at the water surface was very poor because of the mist and although there were some buoys marking the course there weren’t many. Eventually we zig-zagged our way to the turnaround buoy, where a group of us stopped briefly to discuss whether it really was the turning point before getting back to the business of swimming into each other and trying to work out which way to go in the mist. Eventually I got to the swim finish. A couple of helpers pulled me out onto the pontoon and I realised how cold I was – I couldn’t even stand up for a few seconds and just lay there flopping like a dying fish. I finally made my way to the transition tent where I put on a long-sleeve jacket and gloves, over to the bike racks, donned my preposterous pointy hat and off on the bike I went. Swim time 1:18 –6 minutes slower than I’d have liked but hey, it’s a long day.

Yup, that's what it was like

The bike course is three laps of a course that goes out of Henley, up a big hill on a dual carriageway, turns around, goes back down the hill, takes a sharp left and then goes up an even bigger hill, along a false flat at the top for a while, then you turn around and ride back down to the bottom again. It’s the equivalent of a medium-hilly Tour de France stage, except that you have to ride it solo – drafting on the bike, which reduces your energy output by 33% or so, isn’t allowed. I spent most of the first lap just warming up, and was feeling pretty good, but somewhere in the second lap I found out the answer to the question of whether I’d recovered from Copenhagen, and it was “no”. My wheels seemed to have been replaced with square ones and I just had to grit my teeth and grind along. I rode, I muttered, I said the occasional rude word. I went up the hills, I went down the hills. I drank sports drink and slurped disgusting carbohydrate gels. I ate a banana. Eventually, on the descent from the first big hill on the third lap, Nigel, the biker from the relay team, came past me like a train. They’d started half an hour after me so I’d obviously lost a lot of time. I said another rude word and chased him. This was on a steep descent and we both dropped out of the sky like sweaty meteors. It was fun. I then overcooked it a little on the bend at the bottom of the hill and had to do some emergency braking to avoid slamming into the crash barriers. Nigel hammered off into the distance, I shrugged and got back to riding, muttering and swearing. Finally, I made the ascent of Pishill for the last time (so called, we decided, because of what you do out of terror on the steep, winding and badly surfaced descent), made it back down without crashing and got my sorry ass back into transition. All that remained was to “run” a marathon. Bike time 6 hours 20 minutes – not good. I did 5.42 in Copenhagen including a stop to fix my bike.

The run course takes you through Henley, over the bridge and then round a big loop on the other side of the river, and you repeat that four times for a marathon. I have rarely been so pleased not to be on my bicycle and the first km or so was just a pleasure. Then things went downhill a bit. I got cramp in my abdominal muscles, and it got steadily worse until I had to stop at about 2kms. I took advantage of the stop to try to take a stone out of my shoe only to realise that there was no stone – what I’d thought was a stone was in fact the feeling returning to my numb cold feet. After I got running again that injury to my left quad started to make itself known. I overtook some people and some people overtook me. I developed a strong dislike of the runners from the relay teams who came skipping past at speed. Things slowly got worse, although the support from the people watching was unbelievable. The organisers had printed our names on the race numbers and every time I thought I couldn’t go on and needed to just lie down someone would leap out and shout “Go on Rob! Keep going! Yeeeeeeeaahhh” and I’d have to keep moving. Damn it was annoying.

On lap three I started seeing double, which was a bit worrying. I made a point of stopping at a drinks station and getting a load of carbohydrates in. I’d promised myself a little walk break after that but damn, one of my friends was there so I had to run. By the last 2kms I was segmenting the run into 200m chunks: just run another 200. Now another. Keep it up. Back over Henley Bridge and I knew I was home, I even managed to find a bit of speed for the last km. Finally over the finish line in 11.58, 181^st finisher out of about about 450 (about 600 entered and 500 started) and I was done. I phoned home and gave strict instructions to my wife: If I ever suggest doing two long-distance triathlons in a month you are to use any means necessary, up to and including physical violence, to stop me being so ****ing stupid.

Pleased to be finishing

Overall, the relay team beat me by slightly over 50 minutes, but to preserve my honour I should point out that I was faster than them in both the swim and the run (can’t believe the latter, what was Brian doing?) and they only got that time because of the extra time I had to spend pfaffing around in the transitions and Nigel’s super-fast bike riding. We’ve raised well over £4K between us which will fund the opening of a new social club in SW London for kids between 10 and 18 with Down’s syndrome, which is a real result, and I’d like to thank everyone who contributed. 

Right. I see that Ironman Wales 2012 is opening for entries…