National Emergency Services Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

I started off right in the middle, which was fine. I had a couple of team swimmers cut me off because they were incapable of sighting and were swimming in the wrong direction. I tried to swim hard at the start to get in with the faster swimmers, but it turns out I'm still not actually there yet with my swimming, and then found that I was having some trouble with my breathing and had to back off and just relax a bit to sort that out. After that I just took it at my own pace and felt fairly relaxed. With hindsight I should have just started at my own pace...

Swim at my pace from the start. I think I probably did a worse time because I had to back off so much after my excessive start. I need to have faith in my own pacing and not try to keep up with anyone else. I also just need more open water swimming practice.

I've only done one OWS this year and it showed when I got to taking my wetsuit off. It didn't go horribly wrong, but it wasn't as smooth as it could have been. Everything else went well. I ran all the way through transition and ran out with my bike.

More transition practice with the wetsuit. But that comes with more OWS practice.

The hardest part of this course was the wind. It was heavy going into the headwind, so I just tried to push as hard as I could on that side and then maintain as much speed as possible while spinning my legs for some recovery in the tailwind. This is seemed to work fairly well. There was a guy (no 140) who kept passing me into the wind, but then I passed him on the tailwind sections. We did that every lap, so I saw quite a lot of him.

It was also quite challenging to avoid drafting at times as it's only a 5km loop and there were over 250 people on the course. It was a bit frustrating watching other people blatantly drafting, but the marshalls were shouting at them.

The other challenge was the heat. I had a bottle of sports drink on the bike and was trying to make sure I had a good drink on every lap. I didn't have any water, and got a little sick of how much sweet I was taking in over a fairly short space of time.

I lost concentration on the last straight and wasn't pushing as hard as I had on the previous laps. I realised about half a mile from the end and tried to pick up the pace, but probably lost a minute or so on my time for that. Next time - keep concentrating!

It was the first time I've ever done a race with a split transition, and I was running through T2 which was full of bikes looking for a pair of black trainers which did a very good job of hiding... I found them without running past, but it slowed me down.

Do a better job of figuring out my position in T2.

The heat was really obvious on the run, but they had a water station on the exit from T2 so I grabbed a cup of water, drank half of it and dumped the other half over my head. Once I'd doubled back on myself and got to the section heading up the lake the wind was blowing really hard right in my face. I kept telling myself not to fight the wind, just let it blow past me and keep a fairly easy pace until the turn around when it would get easier. I felt like I was running an easy hard pace (that makes sense in my head...), so I was really surprised when my Garmin told me that I did the first mile in 9min, as that's faster than I thought. After that I slowed a little, partly because I got stomach cramps, and the 2nd mile was 9:21, but then I passed another water station where I again drank half the cup and dumped the rest over my head. Felt better after that and with the wind behind me I just ran as hard as I could from there, managing to pass one of my team mates on the way in. I ran other the line and the next person in was no 140, who was the guy I saw on the bike a lot. He was from the wave 4min ahead of mine, so I was quite pleased about that.

I was really pleased with my actual running. I think the stomach cramps were from drinking too much sports drink on the bike, so if I do another event which is this hot I'm going to take water on the bike as well so that I can stay hydrated without the other effects.

I went and joined my teammates to cheer in the last guy (who I passed on the run) and then we cleared transition and took our time loading the bikes back onto the bus. Drank loads of water and sports drink as I was quite thirsty and even sitting around was very hot. We all got showered and put on our finishers Tshirts for a team photo and then headed off in the bus.

The thing I was most pleased about, bearing in mind that this is a C race for me and I didn't want it to impact too much on my training, is that despite pushing as hard as I could during the race, once I was finished I was still capable of running up the stairs the stand where my team was waiting, and I was tired (sleepy), but really not wrecked from it. I guess that means that my endurance training is having an impact.


Need more open water swim practice. Otherwise at the moment this is probably the best performance I could expect.


There was a bbq after the race, for which we all got vouchers, but they hadn't mentioned when they would be packing up. As a result, by the time our whole group had got showered and packed everything on the bus we had missed the food. They let us get burgers at the cafe using the vouchers, but a cold burger wasn't quite the same...