26th of July: Liverpool Triathlon

Place: Liverpool, based at the Echo Arena

Organisers: British Triathlon 

Distance: Olympic (1.5k, 40k, 10k)

Beforehand: Liverpool is a wonderful city, and I've previously  completed both a half and a full marathon, so it was good to return here for my first Olympic distance triathlon. I arrived in the afternoon on Saturday and went off to check in my bike and gear. After the gloucester triathlon I thought I'd be clever and have everything in a box for ease of transport. I left it in the car while I took the bike in. This backfired as you needed your helmet to check in as well as your bike. So I headed back to get the gubbins and went back in. Only to find I couldn't leave anything but my bike and helmet in there overnight. So I brought everything else back, and condensed it into my rucksack, as boxes are also verboten. I then headed to Jamie's Italian for some carboloading. After finding out Breakfast at the hotel wasn't until 7 and I had to be in the water at 7.10, I stocked up on some food from Tesco.

Which brings up one of the odd things with this race, I got given a goody bag with race t-shirt when I registered. See the swag below, note the peanut butter which I'll chow down on in the morning with the rolls I got from Tesco.

Route: This looks to be a fairly flat course which starts off in the docks for the swim, It's going to be cold. Then its a 4 lap of 10k on the bike then 2 laps of 5k on the foot.

This being my first olympic distance I'm a bit unsure on timings. I think it'll be around the 4 hour mark. About an hour for the swim, 2 for the bike and  1 for the run, So let's allow some time for Transition and say 4 hrs 20mins.

Race Day: There were umpteen times throughout the day when I realised how much I was out of my comfort zone with this race.  The first was when the alarm went off at 5am. The next was when I was waiting to head into the docks at 7.10am and realised nobody else was wearing a shorty wetsuit, except me. Then we were in the water and it wasn't that cold, good work Aldi Wetsuit circa 2009, and 1.5k is a long way in open water. Add in a lot of jellyfish and well it was a challenge. I dabbled with a brief bit of Front Crawl but then settled into breast stroke. There was some contortions at times to avoid the jellyfish and more than once I thought about laying on my back and putting a hand up to get dragged out by a canoe. Fortunately, I didn't but about 100 metres from the end I swallowed far too much water and spent  good couple of strokes trying not to vomit. I then gave up trying not a went with it but that didn't work either. Getting to the end of the swim section I dragged myself out onto the pontoon and unsteadily made my way to transition. I was all over the place and very discombobulated.  We were given red bags to put our swim kit in before heading into the arena, I struggled getting out of the wetsuit and this along with trouble getting my shirt on, gave me an abysmal T1 time of nearly 10 minutes.

This was my first race on my new bike and I'm still getting use to the drop handlebars and where the brakes are. As such the 1st of four laps was a tad slow, as I was still getting use to it. Later I sped up and had no real issues. The course was nearly flat apart from a nasty small hill at the 2nd turning point on each lap and another hill just outside the Radisson, which was about half way on the lap in the other direction. From looking at the figures, I was gradually increasing my ranking throughout the bike race until the last lap when I dropped quite prestigiously. I'm not sure what went wrong, maybe it was a foible of the ranking system when finishing the final lap or that quite a few folk passed me on the final corner. I'm leading towards foiable as I don't recall passing anyone on the bike route but rather everyone passing me. This was also a feature of the swim, with wave after wave charging past me, but as ever its me versus the course rather than everyone else.

My legs were like blancmange after getting off the bike and I headed into the arena to drop off my bike in T2. This was a much better tranisition and the time that it took was down to moving from A to B rather than any snags. Throughout the run portion, I stuck to the Walk-Run method, from necessity rather than any game plan. This was based on the mantra of "You can run to that next post, its just a post", which worked very well. This was an extremely flat run course, in and out by the Liver Building. It meant I got a pretty good time for the run portion, considering all the previous activity of the day. What also helped was the encouragement from other runners during my walking portions and one chap who had me run with him for the end of my 1st lap, (I didn't catch his name unfortunately.)The rain started around half way through the 2nd lap and by the end was coming down at a fair rate of knots. I finished if not with a sprint at least strong.

Finish Time and Splits:

Swim: 41 Minutes 57 Seconds
T1: 9 minutes 34 Seconds
Bike:1 hour 41 Minutes 17 Seconds
T2: 3 Minutes 43 Seconds
Run: 1 hour 5 minutes 8 Seconds
Total: 3 hours 41 minutes 39 seconds

So smashed my prediction by about 40 minutes.Woo to the hoo.

Pros: Flat, Well organised, Good PB chance

Cons: It requires an overnight stay, could maybe be more streamlined on the Saturday.

Blisters? Nope

Do Again? I think so, I did get a bit miffed on Saturday with the setup but I think that was down to me not reading the athlete's guide. On the day, it was really well organised and had a great atmosphere.

What I've learnt: I need so much more swimming practice and also to get used to my new bike. Other than that I'm very happy with today's results and feel I could have gone faster probably, especially with T1.