With the triathlon season looking increasingly grim, World Triathlon Corporation has announced a series of virtual challenges, starting with Ironman VR1. This was a middle-distance format with a 5km run, 90km bike and 21km run.
You could complete them in any order starting from 6pm GMT on Friday and finishing at midnight on Sunday. They also had pro challenges with women racing on Saturday and men racing on Sunday. This only included the bike course, done inside on a turbo, via Rouvy.
I put in my 5km on Friday evening. A nice change to use my Nike Next%. Sub-24 minutes without having to push too hard. Then I got up super-early on Saturday morning (8am, things have been slack since the lockdown) and headed out for a loop of Rothwell, Tadcaster, Harewood and home on the bike. There are few cars about and I was able to get down on the aero bars for most of it.
Finally, a long, slow plod on Sunday afternoon for the 21km. I went back to my trusty Brooks Revenna and finished in just over two hours.
It would have been nice to have more than 48 hours notice this was taking place! And, in typical World Triathlon Corporation style, the technology is terrible: my login did not work, I got my confirmation email three times and it keeps saying “register for this event” long after I have completed it.
I didn’t win. I came 3,396 out of 5,320, with a total time of:
5:55:25
My splits were 23:37 for the 5km run, 3:29:47 for the 90km bike and 2:02:01 for the 21km run. Those figures are not accurate, though. First, I cycled 91.66km and ran 21.1km, and it takes the total time. But it also does not factor in elapsed time. I had auto-pause on on my Garmin, which would have pushed me over six hours if not.
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Tags: duathlon, ironman, triathlon
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2020 at 10:26 am and is filed under Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.