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…

Thames Turbo take on Challenge Copenhagen

The aftermath

This was my 6th ironman distance race and like all the others was a roller-coaster ride of emotion and as always a fight with myself to speed up, slow down or just keep going at all. Do other people fight with themselves as well as with the water, wind and pain? For me the voices started the day before the race, doctor. There was a strong wind in T1 and looking at the dull skies and grey water and the bikes being blown over I was thinking “You don’t have to do this. You could pretend to have a cold, or fake a sprained ankle. No-one would know, and you wouldn’t have to do a stupid triathlon in the cold tomorrow”. This happens every time I’ve got something big to do the next day and I shrugged and went back to the building site formerly known as the Park Inn. Dinner was the special meal the hotel had laid on for us and it was good practice for open water swimming with 40-odd hungry race-ready triathletes all trying to get to the pasta at once. By then my mood had changed: I was shockingly relaxed about the upcoming race and really didn’t have any trouble with pre-race nerves at all.

4.45 the next morning and I crawled out of my pit. The hotel’s breakfast was available from 5, and I went down at about 5.10 to find it buzzing. I joined in with the final carbo-load, then it was off to the race. I walked over to T1 by myself, but as I walked down the racks it seemed that every second bike had someone in a red-white-and-blue top who would stop pumping their tyres or arranging their helmet and shout out a greeting. Thames Turbo had 36 people doing the full distance and another four or so relay teams and we really were all over the race like an embarrassing rash. It was lovely and all of a sudden I was grinning all over my face. I sorted my gear out, lubed all the bits that needed lubing, then it was wetsuit on and here we go. Lining up with everyone I was straying into the land of the really stupidly happy: race on! The pros went off at 7 AM and we were all in the next wave at 7.05. Lots of manly handshakes as we lined up wearing our manly pink hats: this was officially the ladies’ wave to which they’d added team turbo, and they’d allocated hat colour by wave on the basis of some crude sexual stereotyping. The start was on the shore and I got a telling off when I disobeyed a marshal who was determined that everyone should start the race dry by stepping forward and rinsing out my goggles.

Yours truly smiling (in the background with the pink swim hat: Mal James is the cameraman and Kim Rowe is the happy looking fellow without the latex headgear.

My crackingly good mood lasted until about 1 minute into the swim. The water was cold and because I hadn’t had a chance to get used to it before the start I was having trouble getting my face down and my breathing was way too hard. I also got a fair old ice-cream headache to make me more cross but I just kept going. Round the first turn buoy and then… where? My state of extreme pre-race relaxation meant that I had been very casual over things like working out where the swim went. I had a rough idea of the course layout but when viewing it the previous day I’d assumed they’d put a few more buoys in to mark it but no, I think there were a total of three on the course as a whole. I did the mental equivalent of a shrug and just followed everyone else, but I wasn’t happy without much to sight on. Still, I got on some feet for a while until the first turnaround, which was marked by a big white pointy buoy with people on it, I think they call those ones “boats”. For the long straight back under the three bridges I was in a loose pack of swimmers that churned around a fair bit, plus the occasional faster swimmer from the next wave moving through us. Round the turnaround buoy in the canal and then back to the swim finish. Why do those last legs of open water swims always seem to take as long as the whole rest of the swim?

I wasn’t wearing a watch and as I got to the swim exit I looked for a clock to get a split from, but there was nothing, or at least nothing that I could see, and I had no idea how long I’d been swimming for. Judging by the number of blue swim hats from the next wave I thought I’d been quite slow and I was a bit dispirited. In fact my split was 1:14, slow for some but for me towards the faster end of my target times, but I only found that out after the race. T1 was fine but delayed by a minute or two by a stop in a portaloo then out on the bike. That felt a lot better and I whizzed through the twisty bits heading out of Copenhagen and then onto the coast road heading North. This road is a time-triallist’s dream: silky smooth surface, mostly flat but with the occasional bump to break things up and just to make it even nicer a bit of a tailwind. I settled down in the aerobars and kept my heart rate on or below 140 and tried to enjoy it. Something was wrong though. My shoulders were hurting just keeping me on the bars and I kept doing the “Contador shuffle”, sliding forward on the saddle and having to push myself back up it. To start with this wasn’t really a bother but after about an hour my triceps and shoulders were really painful and I was forced to get out of the aero position regularly because of the discomfort. I finally worked out what it was: at the Antwerp race a few weeks before my saddle had shifted a bit going over a speed bump and perhaps I hadn’t got it level enough when I put it back afterwards. I’d ridden the bike since but I hadn’t spent an extended time in the aero position. What to do? By the time I got to the aid station at 50km I knew that I absolutely had to stop and adjust it. That and a second quick visit to the portaloo took about 6 minutes in total. There’s nothing more demoralising than standing by the road trying to sort out your tools while listening to the whooooosh of bikes flying past. Bah.

Not sure when this was taken on the bike

By this time we were off the coast road and heading through windy narrow back roads through rural Zealand. I got back to business and rode on, eventually coming to the stretch on the highway heading South that makes up the last section of the loop. This would normally be a great road to ride on but with the tailwind from earlier now being a fairly strong headwind it was just a case of grinding it out into the wind. Eventually I came to the big hill with the food station on it, crowded with supporters and spectators including a vocal group of Turbos who lifted my spirits. Thanks for staying at the bottom of the hill guys, that meant that I could zip past at speed looking as though I knew what I was doing. If you’d been near the top of the hill, well let’s just say we’d have had more time for a chat. Over the section of pave after the highway and back onto the coast road for the second loop. Up to now I’d been riding well and my average speed was something like 33 kph, but now I started to feel really bad. I had no energy and was finding it hard to stay aero. My cadence was dropping to below 80 and I was not a happy camper. I think the problems with my saddle earlier and my attempts to stay down on the bars despite the pain had made my shoulders quite sore and now they’d stiffened up, but I’m not sure why I was feeling so flat aside from that. I ground my way back up the coast and once I turned West again I had a bit of an assessment of my position. OK, I’m feeling really bad and I can’t get aero. I’ll sit up for this section until I get to the highway, ride comfortably and eat as much as I can. Forget about times, this is just a training ride.

The highway and the big (for Denmark) hill. This photo was taken in 2010 but it was the same in 2011, but with many more supporters there.

For the next 30km or so, therefore, I was that guy. The one you pass on the bike at 120km or so into an ironman, riding a flash carbon fibre bike, wearing an aero helmet, sitting up and looking miserable. I always feel a smidgen of schadenfreude when I pass them, so perhaps this was payback time. That little voice was there again “What do you think you’re doing here? You haven’t done anywhere near enough training, you don’t have the discipline to do this properly, why do you waste your time pretending to be some sort of triathlete? Your swim was rubbish, you’ve got a long way to go on the bike and then you’ve got to run, you’re going to have a really bad day because you’re already knackered”. Muttering words I won’t repeat I ground along, making a point of getting as much nutrition in as I could stomach. I was tucking my used gel wrappers into my shorts leg so as not to litter and I wasn’t doing too good a job of slurping the contents out of some of them so I now had sticky pink yuk running down my right leg to add to my grumpiness. Bah.

Of course, and just as I had been telling people the previous day when I was doing my “experienced ironman veteran” act, bad patches come and eventually bad patches go. By the time I got on the highway again I was feeling a bit better, and the wind had changed a bit so it wasn't so much of a horrible grind as before. Once over the teeth-chattering pave and onto the road heading back to the city I was fine again. My speed was back to something acceptable and the closer I got to town the better I felt. Into T2 for a final bike split of 5.42 which was far better than I was expecting an hour before and I was feeling perky again. Hat off, shoes on, bit of banter with the other guys in transition and then out the tent. I handed my bag to the volunteer and she helpfully pointed out that I was deficient in the small matter of my race number. I just dumped out the contents of the bag on the floor, number on and off I trotted while the very pleasant and helpful volunteer re-packed the bag. I felt as good as you can having just biked 180km and had to make a big effort to slow down. The run course was quite twisty and there were lots of buildings so the Garmin was not much help in pacing, plus the distance markers were placed at apparently completely random distances and at least some of them were in the wrong place. Still, after a couple of kms I knew that I was doing around 4.45 to 4.50 a km and feeling nicely relaxed. Just keep tapping it out, don’t overdo it and don’t stop. As always the psychological games about the marathon have to be played. The thought of running 42.2 kms is too frightening, so you have to just focus on the smaller things. I told myself to just get the first lap done and concentrate on that as a goal.

Coming into transition right in the middle of Copenhagen.

I caught David Spencer and we had a bit of a chat, then Mr Crews who told me the tale of the idiot who’d run into his back wheel and broken three spokes. After about 6km I came across the Little Mermaid. I’m going to be here 3 more times, I thought… I wonder how I’ll feel.

Keep it going, keep the pace steady. The run course was clogged up with people doing the ironman shuffle and I spent a fair amount of time weaving in and out of them. My clubmates were everywhere and most of them seemed to be in front of me and going fast. Don’t chase them, just keep to the same pace and they’ll come back to you. At the turnaround at the far end of the run was one of the pros on the deck next to an ambulance and with an IV in his arm. Keep the fluids coming in, you don’t want to end up like that. Tap, tap tap. The 1st 10k went by in about 47 minutes: I’ll take that. Now I was starting to think about finish times, but I wasn’t sure how I was doing because I didn’t know my swim split or how long I’d spent in T1. The run course went by the finish at the end of each lap, I can look at the clock there and see how I’m doing. Got to the bit nearest the finish and no clock in sight. Oh well.

The number of people out supporting or just generally spectating was astonishing. The end of the run lap nearest the finish in particular was just rammed full of people, four or five deep by the course and then sitting on bridges and overpasses. The organisers say there were 125,000 people there and I can believe it. Of the 125,000 the noisiest and most welcome were the endlessly enthusiastic turbo supporters who always brought a smile to my face and gave my tired legs a boost. It was really great having you there everyone and thanks for everything.

Lap two and now it’s getting into the grimmer part of the run. The first 10km are great because you’re so pleased not to have to cycle anymore, and if you survive intact to the last 10km you know you’re heading home, but 10-30 kms is just a slog, especially on multi-lap courses where you’ve seen it all before. Head down and keep it going. Through 20kms and I was just about holding pace but the 4:45s were tending towards 5:00s and I’d started walking through some of the aid stations. I needed to answer a call of nature and ducked into a portaloo. It was so nice to just sit down, locked away from everything in my little blue box. I seriously considered just staying there for an hour or so. Maybe a little nap. No! Get back out there and finish it off.

I still don’t know what time I’m looking at. With a 5.42 bike I should be looking at being well under 11 hours so long as I keep up a reasonable pace, but it would be nice to have a better idea of what I’m looking at. I suddenly remember that I can get the time of day simply by pressing a button on my Garmin. Durr. The time is 4:11 PM. We started at 7:05 so 11 hours is 6:05 PM so I’m going to be well under it. But is that time Copenhagen time or UK time? I haven’t reset the Garmin to local time, and if it’s UK time then it’s really 5:11, is that possible? I have to force my exhausted brain to do the sums, which takes me a while, and I conclude that either I took over two hours for the swim, which is not likely, or it must have set itself to local time automatically. Back to business.

From 25 to about 35 kms is just nasty hard work. I overtake a lot of people even though my pace has dropped to between 5:00 and 5:15 per km. I can keep going but my legs are now really painful and I am feeling horrible. My main struggle is with that inner voice which has popped up again. I’m going to be nearer 10:40 than 11:00, and my target for this race was just to go under 11 hours. I could just stop and take a good long walk and still make it in under 11 hours. No-one would know that I was slacking off,and it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Or you could just walk for longer at the aid stations. Just walk for a minute at this one. Aaaaaargh shutup. I keep going, one thing that helps is the thought that the 10 or so clubmates I’ve passed in the last 15kms would overtake me again if I started walking.

I catch Mark B at about 35 kms. He’s been looking good every time I saw him on the run course but he’s just slowed down a bit more than I have. We run together for a while, then he tells me to just go because he’s really slowing down. He tells me that Straggler’s just ahead. I know that John (Straggler) is a bit ahead of us on the course but he’s surely a lap behind us? Having left Mark at about 38 kms I know it’s in the bag and I don’t have to hold back anymore. Time to run it in and leave it all on the course. I put the hammer down as far as it’ll go and I’m heading home. I can only manage about 4:30 a km but by comparison with most people on the course I’m flying. Finishing an ironman strong is a great feeling. I blow past Jennie and Brian at a drinks station then I’m about 2m behind Mr Taylor as we turn into the finish chute. Since the finish isn’t clearly marked and I still believe that John must be a lap behind me I become confused and stop to check with a marshal whether this is indeed the finish. Yes it is. OK, back to the running as fast as I can. I pass John about 15m from the line and finish in 10:37.

What a great result, for me at least. I’ve known for a while that with the stars in the right place I can go well under 11 hours for an ironman and this time I managed to combine a reasonable bike split with a good run and there it was. I’m particularly pleased given the ‘flu that I caught in December which meant that couldn’t do anything for the whole of January and February and when I managed to get back into training in March I really had to start from the very beginning.  Overall training was sparse as always for me with an average of about 6 hours per week not including the time out at the start of the year: with my job and my family I do as much as I can and I try to make as much of it count as possible, so probably a lot more in the way of hard runs and short, nasty turbo sessions than some. This year I managed to avoid injury and for the first time for 3 years neither of my Achilles tendons was causing trouble, probably accounting for my good run.

A final word about my clubmates. You could easily put together a buzzword-riddled management consultancy seminar about the Thames Turbo group that went to Copenhagen. I think what gives the quality of the team away is the casual acceptance of the extraordinary by the end of the weekend, from the numbers of people finishing in eye-popping times, to stories like those of Jon Crews and Nigel who both had bad crashes on the bike and finished strong all the way to the people who had a hard time but who toughed it out on the run and still made it in. Probably the best triathlon club in the World.

Antwerp top tips

Rob’s top-tips for Antwerp IM 70.3 competitors
1) Keep your tools and spare tubes to hand when blowing your tyres up at 5.50 AM before getting the 6.17 train into London. That way, when one of them blows you won’t have to unpack your rucksack before you can change it.
2) Aero helmets with long pointy tails and big rucksacks don’t go well together when riding a bike.
3) Don’t book your bike in for the Eurostar. It costs money and the check in for freight is so slow that despite getting there an hour early you’ll end up having to run to get your train. Just pack it in a bike box and take it as luggage.
4) Don’t book yourself onto Eurostar the morning after the schools break up for the summer holidays.
5) Don’t stay in the Ibis Antwerpen Centrum hotel. It overlooks a charming square filled with delightful pavement cafes that, come the evening, will fill up with drunk Belgians who will keep you awake until 3 AM the night before your race.
6) Don’t assume that someone knows where the pedestrian tunnel under the Scheld is just because they a) live in Antwerp, b) say they know where it is and c) give you clear, confident directions in good English.
7) Don’t assume that you will be able to buy any useful items at the race expo. My list of things that I wanted to pick up at the expo was CO2 cartridges, elastic laces, wetsuit lube and gels. I got gels.
8) Every time you spot a cashpoint in Antwerp, take out at least 100 Euros. There are so few that this is the only way to ensure you don’t run out of cash.
9) If you have to watch a Tour de France stage with the commentary in foreign, the Sporza (Flemish) commentators are more entertaining than the La Un (French) ones (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgv4fnVsI14 at about 2 minutes for a classic example)
10) When going out for dinner with your fellow Turbos, make sure that at least one of them has a clue as to where the restaurant is.
11) Don’t get to the race start too early on the Sunday, you’ll just have more time to listen to bad Europop on the PA and get cold while worrying about the wind.
12) Flemish heavy metal is better than Europop.
13) Put your timing chip on your left ankle, not the right, or risk being told off by the world’s most pernickety race referee who wanders around T1 telling people off. I’m not even going to mention the toobsh.
14) If the wind is coming from the left of the race start, and there is quite a bit of chop on the lake, start the swim on the right, not the left.
15) When swimming, don’t draft off people who are actually swimming to the rescue boat.
16) The last bit of the swim is a little confusing if you’re not very clever. Swim towards the big red structure near you that is the swim exit, not the small red buoy in the distance that you went past about 100m after the swim start.
17) Don’t make yourself overtake people who are faster than you on the bike just because you don’t like turquoise.
18) If the wind’s strong enough, no-one can hear you scream.
19) Don’t assume that the drinks bottles handed up to you on the bike have their lids screwed on. Check before you slurp or risk a refreshing Isostar shower.
20) There’s a massive pothole about 8km from the bike finish. Don’t ride into it or your saddle will move such that you will be unable to ride on the aerobars for the rest of the bike leg.
21) Don’t take your feet out of your shoes like usual before T2. The Arenburg Forest style pave of the second transition area is very hard to run over barefoot.
22) Your run kit will be by your space on the rack in the bin bag you gave it to the organisers in. Someone may have tied lots of extra knots in it for you. Tear the bag open, don’t feel that you have to undo all the knots.
23) Once you’ve got your run kit out of the bag, if you notice that your socks are inside out, listen to the voice in your head saying “just put them on stupid this is a race not a WI outing”. Pay no attention to your normally very latent OCD tendencies that are saying “But they’re inside out! The outside bit needs to go on the outside, otherwise it’ll be inside, and then the inside bit would be on the outside”.
24) Afrikaans swear words don’t work well in Flemish, interestingly.
25) Run faster.

Outlaw!

Swim start. I'm the one standing up in the middle towards the rear checking my watch. Photo from Bajandiver

The Outlaw 8th August 2010 Race report



The last time I visited Holme Pierrepoint was about seven years ago, when I was running the Robin Hood marathon. The race course came to the lake at HP about halfway up the southern side and we then had to run up to the western end of the lake, back to the other end and then all the way up the other side. It was a stinking hot day and there was a strong westerly wind blowing. When I reached Holme Pierrepoint I was in 17th place (NB this tells you more about the strength of the field than the strength of my running) and going well after about 19 miles. When I left Holme Pierrepoint I was walking and being overtaken by children and elderly ladies. Thus it was with some trepidation that I came to the scene of my earlier humbling once again to test myself beside (and this time in) the 2km long lake. My race preparation wasn’t good: the season had started off well with a couple of sprint races where I managed a PB, but then everything just got a bit pear shaped – I missed a half-ironman in May because I was sick, then June was a nightmare at work after which I had to go to Borneo for a couple of weeks, followed by a week’s recovery from horrible jetlag and then a brief frenzy of training. Overall I averaged a feeble 4.2 hours per week of training average since January 1st. Nevermind, I told myself, you never know how these things will pan out and I did IMWA on about half that training.

I spent the week before the race in my usual state of pre-race hypochondria, convinced that I had a sore throat that was going to turn into a chest infection and stop me racing. My twitchy state wasn’t helped by messages from Tim who had gone up to Nottingham during the week telling me that the lake was full of weed and in a terrible state. Having aborted an open water swim at the Prince’s Club just a few days ago because there was so much weed I wasn’t too excited about having to drag myself through lots more of it. My only consolation was that hopefully the faster swimmers should carve a path through. We left the sprogs with my parents on Friday night and headed up to Nottingham on Saturday morning. Parked at HP, got out of the car and the first person I saw was none other than Mr Male, in his TTTC trisuit, faffing around with his bike. We went round to the NWSC, I registered, sorted out my kit bags, dropped them off, twitched nervously and went back and checked they had everything in, racked the bike, went to the race briefing which was made more entertaining by the race director, obviously already rather tired, trying to rein in his sarcasm when some people asked rather dim questions that mainly revealed that they hadn’t read the race information.

Had a nice dinner at Pizza Express with Pam and Tim, back to our delightful Ibis hotel and its population of football fans and hen parties and off to sleep. Since it was only a 10 minute drive to the venue I’d planned to leave at 5am which should give me plenty of time for pre-race messing around before the start. What I hadn’t planned for was losing the car-park ticket, which led to a period of quiet desperation until I found the car park attendant who cheerfully took some money off me and let me out. It was a beautiful morning at Holme Pierrepoint once I got there and I took my time getting my wetsuit on etc. – too much time, because I then didn’t have time to pump my tires. Fortunately they were still perfectly rideable but I was a bit worried about the increased probability of pinch flats. Still, nothing I could do about it so no point in worrying. Ten minutes to the start and I made my way to the second start bay (1 hour to 1 hour and 20 minutes), had a few practice splashes and bang on 6 AM the hooter went off and we were underway.



The swim was really no fun at all for about the first km. Lots of bumping and barging, no real aggro but just too many people around for comfort. I couldn’t see any of the buoys because we were swimming into the rising sun and so all I could do was just keep the bank on my left. The weed wasn’t too bad, I found: there were some annoying clumps that I had to fight through but the main problem was just all the people either swimming into me or that I was swimming into. I couldn’t get into any sort of rhythm: it seemed that every time I took more than three strokes someone would get in the way. Round the turnaround was nice and then we had the fairly interminable swim back. I got onto someone’s feet for a while and took the time to admire their lovely ballet-dancer like pointy toes, until I got a bit close and found that they had decidedly un-balletic long sharp toenails. Slooooowly the buildings at the finish line got closer and I could track my progress from the distance signs on the bank for the rowing races. In the last 400m I finally got some nice clear water and managed to get some good swimming done at last. As I came to the swim exit I was pretty despondent, thinking that there was no way I was under 1:20, but as the nice men pulled me out of the water my watch was reading 1:12. Wahey! I have to admit that my first thought was “great! Now I can really slack off in T1” but I soon put that out of my head. Another nice man helped me off with my wetsuit and I charged into the changing tent to total bedlam with loads of people everywhere. I found my bike kit bag and tried twice to get into the male change area only to find it completely full. No worries, I didn’t need to change anyway so why was I messing around? I dumped the contents of my bag on the floor, stuffed my wetsuit in, grabbed everything, got rid of the bag and wetsuit and ran round to the bikes. Number belt, shoes, helmet, sunglasses, energy bar in each pocket and I grabbed Serenity and headed out on the start of the bike. Once round the lake and off into the wilds of Nottinghamshire.

Off round the lake on the bike. Photo from Bajandiver again.

The bike course for the Outlaw has been described using adjectives like “fast” and “flat”. I found it to be neither. You ride out about 12km from HP and then go three times round a big loop, and no part of the loop is flat, with constant short climbs and then a series of long drags up towards the northern part of the loop. This is then followed by a good few miles of gradual descent on good roads where you can maintain a nice high speed, but overall the hills, combined with a fair number of tight bends mean it’s quite tough if you’re trying to ride fast. Obviously it’s not a really hard or hilly course, but it’s certainly a lot harder than, something like IMWA or the Challenge Barcelona course. I put in a fair effort on the first lap and finished it with an average speed of 31.7 kph, overtaking a lot of people which was a pain – I only saw a small amount of real drafting but there was a lot of (probably unintentional) riding in loose packs that made it really hard to get by people if you wanted to ride clean. I saw quite a few marshals on motorbikes but they didn’t do anything to break the packs up which would have been helpful. Lap two was fractionally slower and psychologically quite hard, plus my saddle came loose on one of the climbs. Fortunately the legendary Paul L from tritalk was spectating just where I had to stop, dressed for some reason in a poncho and sombrero. I scrounged some Allen keys (I had some myself but they would have taken a minute or two to get to), tightened up the saddle and off I went again. Lap 3 was good, I kept the effort up and felt good the whole way round, going through 100 miles in 5:07. The overtaking business was a bit of a pain again because by the second half of the lap we were lapping some riders. I had a bit of a nasty scare when I got to one of the aid stations to find they’d run out of sports drink – I had visions of the kind of wall-hitting that had happened to me in Barcelona when I missed a drinks station happening again, but I got to the next aid station with no trouble. Finally back to the Lowdham roundabout and this time instead of turning left for another lap I zoomed straight through on my way back to transition. This was when I realised how many people had only been on their second laps because the road was suddenly empty whereas before it had been full. Back to Holme Pierrepoint was mostly fun although the dodgy roads, gravel and speed bumps towards the end of this section slowed me down a bit. Finally turned back into the watersports centre and was surprised by the dismount line – only just managed to unclip without falling over.

Final bike time was 5:47, exactly the same as my bike split from Barcelona. This one was much more satisfying though because as I’ve said, it’s a deceptively hard course: only three people went under 5 hours, and I kept up a sustained but manageable level of effort the whole way round. Nutritionally I did it all on three gels and probably five bottles of sports drink. The two energy bars that I’d stashed in my pockets to munch on both fell out before I got to the start of lap one.

Into the change tent for T2, sat down next to a guy who was munching an energy bar and asked him how he was doing. He looked back at me with empty eyes and mumbled something and I realised that I was in the presence of the living dead and I left him to fight his own battles. Shoes on, spent way too long messing with the Garmin and off I trotted. The first part of the run is just a run round the rowing lake, followed by three laps of an out-and back along the Trent with a further lap of the lake after each one. Once again I was running on a hot day by Holme Pierrepoint rowing lake – redemption or another disaster? I went off fine, feeling a bit tired but not too bad. The first three kms were fine and I was going at about 4.30 pace. That seemed a bit fast and I eased off to about 5.00 per km. This still seemed a bit fast and I slowed down a bit more. I glanced at my heart rate once and it looked high but I’ve often found that the Garmin gives some strange spikes occasionally so I didn’t pay attention. This was probably a mistake because on reviewing the data later it seems that not long after I started the run my heart rate went right through the roof and stayed there for about twenty minutes. Not sure what it was caused by but had I realised I’d have slowed right down until it went back to normality: as it was I kept up the effort, told myself I was just having a bad patch and tried to run through it. Once round the lake I saw Pam who got quite excited then it was onto the out and back and a big shout and high(ish) five for Tim as he ran along on his way to 6th place overall. I was feeling OK-ish when I got back to the lake, but then I had a stop for the loo and straight afterwards I got nasty abdominal cramps that reduced me to a hobble/walk: Holme Pierrepoint won again.

On the run before the wheels fell off. Please admire my ripped quads and don't notice my receding hairline.

Hobble, walk, hobble, walk. I finally managed to get the cramps under control and got back to something approaching running but by now I was melting in the heat and feeling like death. I ran from aid station to aid station and taking walking breaks while I poured water over my head and swilled coke. The second out and back by the Trent was hard and then the third was just mind over matter as I made myself keep going. Finally I made it back to the lake and set off to the far end for the fourth time. I swung round by the final aid station, took a little walk break, girded up my loins and headed for home. Turning left into the finish chute felt gooooood and I crossed the line in 11.16.31 following a 4.06 marathon (a PW for the distance!). I felt fine after the race, ate some pasta, picked up my gear and had a fabulous shower. I then met up with Tim who procured some marvellous beer: even nasty lager tastes good after a day of slurping isotonic long-chain maltodextrin solutions.

I was a bit disappointed not to manage a sub-11 finish but on later reflection I’m happy with how I did. My swim time was a real surprise – lots of people seem to have had fast times and it’s possible the course was a bit short but I think it’s unlikely. More probably the very calm lake coupled with the simple course and easy navigation just led to lots of people going fast. The bike was great, a real breakthrough ride for me with a good, solid consistent effort the whole way. Ifell apart on the run but I think I was basically just undertrained and there’s an easy remedy for that next time. Even given the crash and burn on the run I finished in 146th place out of 714 finishers. Compare this with 453/1023 at IMWA and 439/1282 in Barcelona and I’m definitely moving up the rankings. Best of all this time I finished the race without a screaming pain in either achilles tendon, unlike the last two IMs I’ve done, and this time I should be able to run in the next six months rather than limping around and whinging.

This was the first year that the Outlaw has happened, and the race organisation was superb: pretty much everything was spot on, and all of the important things. The marshalls and all the other volunteers were superb and the whole thing was a real success. The UK now finally has a really well-run, properly organised ironman distance race that charges about half as much for registration as the competition and I would recommend this to anyone wanting to go long in the UK. 

Race 2

I didn't get round to writing anything about race one. It didn't go too well: I got very cold waiting for the start and then suffered in the wind on the bike. I then added to my slow time by making a splendidly stupid error: I spent 8 minutes in the neutralised bike zone going back to transition, when you're only allowed 7, meaning that I had an extra minute added to my race time. I would like to point out that I spent this 8 minutes of dawdling (and waiting at traffic lights) wearing my pointy hat, which probably saved me 15 seconds over the race...

So to race 2. These races have pool swims and competitors are set off at 15 second intervals. I was number 447, so my start time would be around 8:45 am. This wouldn't be a problem at all if I didn't have to register sometime between 6:00 and 6:30 am; but unfortunately, I did; so I had to get up at 5:15 for a race starting 3 1/2 hours later. The early morning had its usual effect: I got up, stumbled around loading everything in the car, kissed Pam goodbye, got in the car, remembered that I'd forgotten to eat breakfast, ate breakfast, got in the car, drove off and then promptly drove back to the house where I went in to get my pump and then finally made my way to Hampton Pool where I picked up my number, had the same number written on various bits of my body with marker pen, racked Serenity and then mooched around for a long time, variously reading, drinking coffee, queuing for the loo, watching people swim, queuing for the loo again but mostly watching the cold Northerly wind shaking the trees. There was steam rising from the heated pool until the wind took it, and it was almost as cold as the last race.

Finally, fifteen pages, two coffees, three visits to the loo and assorted mooching later it was approaching my moment. I sorted out transition, stripped down to my trisuit and went and joined yet another queue, this one featuring an array of shivering goose-pimply misery. "I'm swiiiimmmminng in the Caribbean, the Caribbean and I'm in my haaaaaaapppy place" sang racer 446 as we stood with our feet warming in the kiddie pool waiting to start. 445... 446... 447 and Mr Taylor sent me off.

Twelve lengths, 426m. The pool is divided into six lanes so you go up one side, turn, back down the other side, go under the lane line as you turn, rinse and repeat. I tried to keep my stroke rate up, my legs up and my head down and just enjoyed the lovely warm water. The seeding was obviously dead on: no-one overtook me, I overtook no-one and the whole swim was easy and trouble free. Coming out of the water my time was 8:13, 27 seconds faster than race 1. I put on a rain jacket in T1 because the cold wind was really Oh so cold, shoes, helmet, sunnies, number, stuffed a gel up the leg of my trisuit and scampered out to the bike mount. Total time (swim and T1) was 10:21.

The start of the bike course is just outside the entrance to the pool, just before a bus stop. Of course, when I got there the bus stop was occupied by a bus which was also blocking the road and so I had to wait until old Mrs Miggins had found her bus pass before I could start riding. Once it had actually started moving the bus seemed to be unable to go at a speed greater than 18 mph as it slowly drifted down into Hampton with me grinding my teeth until the driver swung over in a leisurely fashion into another bus stop, this time giving me enough room to pass. Out of the saddle, bang bang bang and up to speed, down on the bars, take the left turn onto the main road towards Hampton Court and up to 40 kph. That bit was fine, but it was also the only bit where there was any real tailwind. Once round the roundabout and heading back to Hampton it was headwinds and crosswinds, and there was nothing for it but to try to stay aero and grind into the wind. Nothing remarkable happened on the way out to Chertsey. I negotiated the Nine Speedbumps of Doom and the Potholes of Despair in Sunbury without falling off or breaking my bike, and successfully swerved around every one of the Uncountable Traffic Calming Measures of Shepperton. All the way the crosswinds blew me around and slowed me down, and knowing the wind was a Northerly I didn't expect it to get any better on the way back. I was correct.

Coming back the crosswinds were now more like a full headwind, and my enjoyment was increased by the traffic. First I got stuck behind a slow-moving Fiat in Shepperton, and then another car in Sunbury which took it veeery easy over the Speedbumps of Doom, went a little faster for a couple of minutes but then stopped altogether because somewhere in the distance there was a bus coming in the other direction. Nice one. Having escaped Sunbury and its combination of shocking road surfaces, excessive traffic calming measures and drivers who seem to have taken too many mogadons I put the hammer down as best I could for the last couple of kms back to the bike stop, enjoying the close attentions of the driver of a dark blue BMW who clearly thought that six inches space was plenty to pass a bike. Total bike time 39:06 or 33.3 kph average speed. Annoying because I really lost a lot of time to the bus and the Sedated Sunbury Sedan.

Never mind. I took advantage of the neutralised zone going back to Hampton Pool to slurp down my delicious and nutritious gel, and made quite sure that this time I took less than seven minutes. As I rode back through the car park to T2 I took my right foot out of my shoe but only got halfway through doing the same with my left foot before the bloke in front suddenly decided to stop, meaning that I had the interesting experience of trying to unclip with the straps on my shoes undone. Fortunately I managed to avoid the obvious outcome and remained upright.

One consequence of the neutralised zone in the TTTC races is that you suddenly go from easy pootling along to full-on race mode. As soon as I got into T2 I was back racing and after a quick change of shoes, helmet and jacket off I was off running. I immediately felt good: I was moving along nice and fast and everything seemed just right. I nipped around someone on the way out of transition, out onto the road and got the hammer down. Up to bushy park, reeling in another competitor, through the gate
and then onto the big loop that you run. I went past the 1km sign at 4:40 on the clock (including T1), left by the drinks station and past the 2km sign with my Garmin registering a 3:39 km split. Interesting: my stride was shorter than a normal 5k race but my cadence was high and I just felt good. The third km was a bit slower because of the wind but I carried on passing runners, including a lady who was going pretty fast herself. Then back round for the second loop, past 4km in 16:25 and could I manage a 3:35 final km for a sub-20 minute 5km run and transition from the bike? Not quite: I crossed the line in 20:06 and then had to have a little lie down on the grass for a while until I got my breath back and had a nice chat with Kat who had just done her first tri.

The final result was 47th place overall and 11th M40-49. A new PB for that course of 1:09:34, which is about a minute faster than my previous best. My combined swim and T1 of 10:22 was 134th fastest, so in the top third which is better than usual for me. Bike split of 39:06 was 70th fastest and my run+T2 split of 20:06 was 21st fastest and the fastest overall in the M40-49 category. In fact looking at the results I think my run was the fastest for any male >40, so I am officially the fastest running old grunter in sprint triathlons in Middlesex in early May.

Lessons learnt: not much that I could have done about the bus or Mr Mogadon in Sunbury, but I have a real tendency to slow my cadence down and grind when there's a headwind. My average cadence on the bike was only 83, and I know that I do best at about 90-95. The other big lesson is not to listen to myself the night before a race: I really didn'f feel like doing this the night before, and I'm really glad I did now. Finally, Fuller's London Pride seems to work very well for pre-race carbo loading.

High quality race prep.

All normal people are in bed and asleep at 6 AM on a bank holiday Monday. Good for them. I will be standing around in a lycra suit next to a swimming pool in Hampton because tomorrow is my first race of the season: race one in the Thames Turbo Triathlon Club series. My preparation has been, hmmm, questionable so far. I've done some work on the turbo trainer, a bit of running and the occasional swim but there have been lots of interruptions: work, resurgent achilles tendonitis on occasion and then bursts of apathy to slow things down as well. I've taken steps to make up for my lack of form though: most importantly I've got myself a really nice new bike. I picked up the frame nice and cheap from someone on Ebay: the poor guy had got a new frame as part of an insurance deal but had then come into some financial trouble and had to sell it. I felt bad as I took it off his hands but once I started stroking its shiny carbon curves the guilt passed.

I already had the wheels, and I got the components from a variety of more or less dodgy internet suppliers, ending up with a big pile of small expensive pieces of alloy and carbon fibre and a frame. I managed to conquer my fear of headsets and bottom brackets and assemble it into a working bicycle over a few days and only made a mess of one thing, the cable housing for the front brake. Et voila! A splendidly shiny aero super bike. This does put me into an unfortunate position because I have now moved myself into the category of "middle aged bloke on a really flash bike". Add the aero helmet into the mix and my race is doomed: I am looking forward to being passed by people on mountain bikes, small girls on sparkly pink bikes with streamers and old ladies on black sit-up-and-beg single speeds.

Swimming wise I'll be fine though. I got a bit distracted by work and apathy for a while but I went on Friday morning and then again this morning. This means that I have now swum 2/3 as much in the last two days as I did in the previous month, so I should be fine. Running has been continually interrupted by the achilles tendon but in the last few weeks it's got a fair bit better (touches wood) so I went and ran the Bushy Park 5k yesterday. Unlike my normal strategy of running the first two kms way too fast and then spending the rest of the race grovelling along with my tongue hanging out I forced myself to run the first bit more sensibly and had the pleasant experience of finishing strong and passing lots of people. The whole course was saturated and slippery and I ended up in a comedy sprint for 16th place with mud and feet flying in all directions. Final time was 18.58 which isn't fast but given the slime we were running through I'm happy with that.

Swim will be down to my usual standards then. Bike might be OK and the run should be alright. I'm one of the last people off so there should be plenty of time for the prevailing crosswinds to get going, and I'll enjoy running while most other people have finished and the marshals have all got really fed up with hanging around in the cold. As I type this Fabian Cancellara is rampaging up the Bosberg in the Ronde van Vlaanderen just to give me some perspective. At least there aren't any cobbles tomorrow.

Calendar for 2010 so far

OK, getting it back together. Achilles tendon is almost fixed, now I just have some respiratory lurgy. This is my calendar for 2010 so far:

7th March Surrey Rumble 
28th March VO2 Sportive
5th April Thames Turbo Sprint 1
3rd May Thames Turbo Sprint 2
16th May Etape du Dales
23rd May Swashbuckler Triathlon
13th June Bala Middle Distance Tri
23rd-25th July London to Paris in 24 hours
8th August Outlaw Triathlon (IM!)
4th September Vitruvian Triathlon


That really should keep me quite busy. Oh yes. The middle part of May in particular might be a little tiring...