Home Chat General Chat

Trentham Triathlon Report

The weather wasn't great with wind and heavy rain forecast for the whole day, regardless over 700 athletes decided to compete. The day started with the Big half competitors. I was competeing in the sprint event which attracted the largest number of athletes.
The water wasn't exactly warm so everyone who had a wetsuit wore one. Everyone seemed suprisingly relaxed before the start with many having a chat whils standing in the shallow lake. There seemed to be a lot of young and promising triathletes form the 4lifetri club with their distinctive purple trisuits. The start to the swim was extremely hectic with a lot of kicking, slapping and pulling back . Someone even tried to swim over the top of me, but i managed to pull away from them. The swim went realtively well being in the top 20 out of the water i knew i had alot of work to do to win the age group or even to get a podium finish.
This time there were no problems with the wetsuit and i was already starting to make up ground during the longish run to T1. As i entered T1 in state simillar to being drunk i forgot where i racked up my bike!! I knew that it was somewhere near the back but many others racked after me and my bike simply dissapeared in a jungle of inter-locked handlebars . I spent good 2 minutes running up and down looking for for a distinctive white bike with bright blue handlebar tape bike.
As a result i was passed by a large number of competitors. Everyone was suffering on the bike leg thanks to the gusty wind on the way out. The bike went smoothly with no major catastrophies, and slowly but surely i was clawing back places although at this point i knew that there was no hope of a age group win. Bike time was 39. 43 which wasnt bad considering the wind although i was hoping for a sub 38 on the 23 km course.
Bad luck struck twice during the race, this time in T2 someone put a towel over my running shoes and i spent good 5 minutes trying to find them, all the hard work on the bike was wasted as a result, after a lot of swearing and running round T2 i finnaly manged to find them and sprinted off after the competition, but it was rather pointless now, Run time was around 25 minutes together with the disastrous transition much slower than the target 18 minutes. Final result was 13th place matched suitably with the bad luck i had on the day.
Well done to everyone that competed in these testing conditions and especially all the fellow youths who showed some of the adults how it's meant to be done, there were some impressive swim times registered by some of the under 18s with many braking 12 minutes

Comments

  • gingertrigingertri Posts: 277
    well done!
  • apana790apana790 Posts: 76
    thanks
  • apana790 wrote:

    Bad luck struck twice during the race, this time in T2 someone put a towel over my running shoes and i spent good 5 minutes trying to find them
    Yeah someone rolled a tractor over my transition area Felt like throwing his shoes into the loch. my black bag was under my bike and ended up under some twats wetsuit and other random stuff
  • apana790apana790 Posts: 76
    hehe, yeah some transition areas are a bit disorginized. Investing in a plastic box and a ballon for next time might be a good idea. £5 will save about 5 minutes, much more cost effective than all the areo wheels, helmets, frames etc.
  • haha we aint allowed plastic boxes or anything here...hence all our stuff was soaking...
  • shadowone1shadowone1 Posts: 1,408
    Yeah that really annoyed me. It was pissing with rain, blowing a gale and generally a horrible day and you weren't allowed a lidded box in t1/t2. I used a plastic bag for my run shoes but they were still wet.

    Its not like there wasn't plenty of room. Then to top it off they decided to dismantle the transistion area and dump everyones stuff on the ground. That was bad sport if you ask me....
  • apana790apana790 Posts: 76
    in trentham the transition was just really cramped with when everyone racked up and some of the less careful knocked others shoes around the place and just generally messed things up, that's triathlon for you but the marshalls were great
Sign In or Register to comment.