Posts Tagged ‘triathlon’

On Friday, we staged our first Mini Triathlon. It consisted of a 400-metre swim in the pool, a 10 km cycle in the spin studio and a 2 km run around campus. It was a lot to organise but well worth it. Eight athletes took part and apart from having to invalidate the bike results due to a misconfiguration, everything went smoothly. We can’t wait to run some more events like this next year.

Back in May, Jonas Deichmann set out to try and complete 120 long-format triathlons in a row. Last week, he finished it. This surpasses Sean Conway’s previous record of 105. Congratulations, Jonas!

Lots of exciting thing happened at Challenge Roth this year.

In the men’s race, Magnus Ditlev set a new men’s course record of 7:23:24. And in British interests, Tom Bishop moving up to long format, came second with 7:37:54. He was actually overtaken by Rudy Von Berg on the run but battled back to regain second place.

In the women’s race, Anna Haug set a new women’s course record of 8:02:38. It was only two years ago that Katt Matthews set the first women’s sub-8 at Sub7 / Sub8 under artificial conditions and now Haug is less than three minutes from doing it in a race. Also, she’s 41!

Further down the field, Jonas Deichmann completed his 60th full distance triathlon in a row to mark the halfway point in Challenge 120. He’s been taking up to 15 hours to complete them, meaning less than a full night’s sleep, and yet incredibly is still banging them out every day as he chases Sean Conway’s record.

In 2015, James Lawrence, also known as the Iron Cowboy, set the world record for number of full distance triathlons completed on consecutive days: 50. In 2021, he raised the bar to 100 and then in 2023, Sean Conway raised the bar to 105.

Last week, Jonas Deichmann kicked off Challenge 120: an attempt to complete 120 full distance triathlons in 120 days. For reference, that is a 3.8 km swim, 180 km cycle and a 42.2 km run (full marathon) each day. You can follow him each day on his live tracker and there are daily updates on Instagram, too.

In 2018, I launched my course Triathlon For Beginners and subsequently set up a Facebook group to facilitate peer support. Six years later and I am pleased to announce the group has now hit 100,000 members.

My Running For Beginners group did the same in January.

I have some battle stories from what spammers will try in a group that size 😆. But it has been wonderful to watch so many people sharing stories, encouragement and support.

Helmsley Open Air Swimming Pool run a triathlon as a fundraiser each year and it has been on my list for a while: a swim in a heated outdoor pool followed by a bike course around the Moors and a multi-terrain run. It did mean getting up at 4:15 am to drive to Helmsley but surely it would be worth it for the views.

The swim

The pool is beautiful. I wouldn’t quite say bath water but it was a perfect temperature once you were swimming. The swim consisted of 32 lengths (800 metres) and I seemed to seed myself just right, with one overtake and one giveaway during the swim. My lane counter was also wonderful encouraging.

I felt a bit overwhelmed at times during the swim. It’s been very disappointing going from multiple-Ironman finisher to lacking confidence in open water again and here I wasn’t even in open water. It was just a pool that happens to be outside. It has been difficult for me to swim this year and it really shows. I was happy enough with my pace, though.

With one DNF and two cancelled swims, this turned out to be my first completed triathlon swim of the year.

The bike

They said the bike course was hilly. But they also posted a screenshot, with no GPX supplied, saying the elevation gain was 323 metres. I took this to mean they were warning anyone coming up from Lincolnshire that Yorkshire was a bit hillier than home.

But the elevation was simply wrong. We took on the Bransdale Loop through the heather of the Moors, which was very beautiful, but also amounted to 732 metres of elevation gain. There were multiple steep climbs with a maximum gradient of 18%. I was running out of food by the end because I did not expect to be out on the bike course for so long.

The views were stunning, though.

The run

The run starts with a four-kilometre climb up the hill we had just cycled down. I went for a run-walk strategy. Once the hill was completed we turned off the road and went onto trail which was practically all down hill. Game birds were hiding in the hedges and would often run out in a panic as we approached.

Most of it was well-signposted and I only got lost at one point after the farm. The answer was to just keep following the bridleway and I eventually discovered I had indeed been going the correct way. There was a final little hill to get back to the pool and then it was a victory lap of the field.

The result

My total time was:

3:27:34

And my splits were:

This put me 32nd out of 46 in the open (men and trans women) category. This year I have been concentrating on ultrarunning and not training for any kind of speed so it is probably a fair result.

A big thank you to all of the volunteers at Helmsley Open Air Swimming Pool that made the race happen.

Even with a leisurely start time, my alarm went off at 06:00. I debated whether to get up. After a hard time at Lough Cutra and a hard time at Metalman, I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to take on Kilkenny. But I also need to get back into the water.

In the end, the swim was cancelled due to water quality anyway. Replaced by a 2.4k run along the same run course we could take on twice after the bike. The first run was easy enough. A lot of people sprinted off and soon realised that had over-paced themselves. Even after T1 the running wasn’t over as the mount line was up a steep grassy hill.

The bike was great. Lots of clear junctions or guards stopping traffic for us. The first half of the course was into a headwind and few other people were using aerobars so even riding at less than 200 Watts I was passing long lines of athletes who were struggling into the wind. Maybe only three stronger cyclists came past me, although I was in the third of three waves.

The second run was also comfortable enough. It is not a flat course but I was just about able to pace myself up the hill. We finished on the top lawn in front of Kilkenny Castle.

My overall time was:

1:20:27

I just scraped into the top half coming 100th out of 212 athletes. Of course, I’m in the M30-39 category, so that only translates to 21 of 34. My splits were:

Pace wise, I was 165th in run 1 and 77th in run 2, so some nice negative splits going on there.

Metalman is a middle distance triathlon on Ireland’s south coast. It takes place in the town of Tramore just down the road from Waterford.

The was on the Saturday so we headed down on the Friday to check into our hotel, get registered, and get a quick fish and chips by the sea. Tramore beach itself is quite exposed with some arcades and a fair ground with a Bridlington feel going on.

The swim

Rough seas meant the swim was cancelled so it was straight into a 90k bike ride. I was very relieved. I’ve struggled to acclimatise to sea swimming over here and that was before all of the jellyfish started appearing. Still, we went in reverse alphabetical order so I was one of the first people on the start line with a hundred super bikes behind me.

The cycle

The route was described as challenging but when you are from Yorkshire, it would very much be labelled as “Yorkshire flat”. That said, the first half of the loop to Dungarvan included a bit of a headwind. Nice straight roads made for plenty of aero time for those that had been practising it.

After the half-way feed stop it turns back along the coast road. This offers some glimpses of the seas before moving inland for a while and then comes back to the cliff tops for some more undulating terrain. I stand by my previous comment about the profile but there was one climb from a beach to a cliff that did briefly hit 15%.

The run

Once back into transition it was onto the run. This was hilly. There were some flat bits but some quite steep hills, too. One of the hilliest triathlon run courses I have done. Thankfully, it finishes with a long downhill. I walked a lot of the uphills but mostly ran the rest of the way.

I thought the race instructions promised Red Bull at the half way point but alas, there was only water. There was plenty at the finish line, though, which I was very glad to see.

Results

My overall time was:

5:34:40

That was good enough for 165 out of 192 athletes. My splits were:

In an improvement over Lough Cutra four weeks ago, this one was not a DNF. My bike spit was faster by 25 minutes. Lough Cutra was about five kilometres longer but I was definitely in a bit better shape this time, though I had skipped a swim. My run time was less than a minute behind despite all of the hills and none of the cola.

While in some ways it is a defeat because I don’t think I would have made it around the swim course if the swim had been on. But accepting that life is hard right now, the rest of the numbers are promising. I would like to say thank you to the race organisers for being so kind and welcoming.

I did make it into one of the official race photos. You can see me sitting on the wall in the bottom right:

To date, I’ve completed 54 triathlons across all distances and never had a DNF. That changed this weekend. I headed over to Lough Cutra Castle to take on The Gauntlet middle distance race. It is part of the Castle Triathlon Series alongside Castle Howard which I raced last year.

Preparation

Training had been going okay. I’ve been doing around seven hours per week. I have mostly focused on ultra running this year but I was consistently getting a swim in each week. My weakness was probably the bike as I had not taken it outside much this year.

I did try to get a long ride in a few weeks ago but I got a slow puncture and had to limp home. I had the local bike shop replace the tyre and they put some sealant in it. I gave it a few days and it was holding its pressure: happy days, I was ready to race.

Finally, I arrived at the venue on the morning of the race and found the tyre completely flat with sealant leaking all over my boot. I pumped it up and hoped for the best. Everything else went okay.

The swim

The swim course is a single lap around an island and back down the lake. The water was lovely and warm. Somewhere around 17-18 degrees. The wind had really picked up, though, and it made it very choppy. I’ve never seen anything like it on a lake; it was like having a sea swim.

The first half of the course was into the wind and fighting against the waves was very disorienting every time I tried to front crawl. I kept switching to breaststroke to calm myself down and then trying again but it wasn’t getting better so I did almost all breaststroke to the turn buoy and back, hoping that on the way back it would be going with the wind and therefore easier.

It was not easier. But I was also getting increasingly tired from the breaststroke and increasing cold from not going anywhere. I kept looking at how far away the side of the lake was. I’m used to having a little panic attack in the swim, dealing with and getting on with it. But the panic just kept coming and coming.

After 45 minutes in the water, I waved the white flag. The canoeist came over and supported me until the rib arrived to haul me out of the water. They checked my temperature and dropped me off at the swim start point.

The bike

I spoke to the officials in transition and they said they were happy for me to continue if I was feeling okay. Albeit with an official DNF, of course. I took a few minutes to get myself together and did a slow transition before heading out on the bike.

Th bike course is one single 94k loop. The route heads up to south shore of Galway Bay and takes in a lot of The Burren. The landscape was stark and barren. It reminded me a lot of the the north of England. The coastline was picturesque, too, and there was wide view from the top of Corkscrew Hill.

It is a flat course with less than 800 metres of evaluation gain and only two real climbs over the 94k. I was constantly stopping to check my tyre was holding pressure and thankfully it did for the whole race. But it took me a good 30 km to trust it.

Then I hit the first climb and my front derailleur stopped working. The gear shifter was stiff and nothing happened when I pressed it. I got off and walked my bike to the top of one section. When I got off it, it worked fine. But then I would get back on and it would stop working again. Great, I thought, just when I was starting to trust the bike.

I descended the first climb and at this point, my Garmin decided to suggest I was off course and needed to make a U-turn. I couldn’t remember seeing a sign so I tracked back a kilometre until I saw another competitor going the opposite way. I was on the right road after all. That added an extra kilometre onto my route.

Later on, my front derailleur started working again. That was nice.

The big takeaway from the cycle was how evident it was that I had not spent enough time in the saddle. I was able to put the power out but my bottom was so sore by the end that I had to stop every 10k for the last 30 kilometres to give it a rest.

The run

Finally, onto something I felt comfortable. No drowning, no mechanicals, just regular running. Just 3 x 7k loops.

I felt pretty crap by this point but 21k did not seem insurmountable. I did some walking on the first lap and realised I was probably under-fuelling so tried to have a gel and some coke on each lap. This made me feel better, although my pace was pretty consistent. I wanted to chill out but also get under seven hours even though it was meaningless given I didn’t complete the swim.

The feed station had coke the entire time. Often they run out by the time I’m getting towards the end of my run. They did run out of cups, though, so we had to try and drink from the bottle without touching the bottle which ended exactly how you might imagine it to end.

Things were quiet on the second lap and even more quiet in third. Except for the occasional child on a bike coming past me as by this time, their off-road triathlon had started.

I was very pleased to arrive at the finish line. I declined the medal as I hadn’t really finished the thing. Castle Race Series do a good job of high-quality food for Gauntlet competitors and I was given a beef stroganoff (vegetable was also available, of course).

The result

My official result is, of course:

DNF

But for what it is worth, my watch recorded a time of 6:55:50 which breaks down into the following splits:

The run time was frustratingly slow. I’m not a gifted athlete. So, when I started getting my run times down, like the 1:48 I ran at Outlaw X it felt great. This was slow. Not quite Weymouth slow but I am still training seven hours a week and this is all I get?

I want to say a big thank you to all of the volunteers who cheered me on at feed stations and junctions, and gave up their time to make the race possible. And to the water safety crew for looking after me.

The aftermath

What went wrong?

My training hasn’t been stellar. I haven’t done any open water swimming this year and my training has been loosely structured. But I stress that I am still training around seven hours a week, which is a lot by any normal person’s standards and enough to complete a middle triathlon triathlon.

The lack of structure was also unhelpful. It is one thing to be putting in the hours. But I wasn’t getting the long rides in. This just made things uncomfortable; it didn’t stop my race. But the lack of open water swimming really did kill my race. This is time consuming and difficult in early season and I just haven’t had the temporal or mental capacity to do difficult and time consuming things.

More to the point, I think I am just in a bad place psychologically right now. The various crises going on in my personal life and being utterly overloaded by trying to do a PhD, work three jobs, be a dad and still train have taken its tole. I’ve felt anxious, depressed, sad, hopeless and overwhelmed. All of these challenges mean my resilience is running lower than usual. And if feeling that way wasn’t enough, here is the proof that things are hard right now. Perseverance is one of my signature strengths but it just isn’t fully there at the moment.

After the race, I felt like I didn’t want to do triathlon anymore. Or maybe just some sprints. It still hurts right now which is no place to make a decision. But I am also on the clock as I already had another middle distance booked for four weeks time.

Let’s look at what went right. I got 45 minutes into the swim. I kept myself safe. I cycled for 95 km for the first time since August. I ran a half marathon and did all of this on the same day: even though this is my fifth middle distance it is still no easy thing to do.

I find it hard to give myself and a break and say these things to myself so I am going to say them here: Chris, I love you and I’m so proud of you. For fighting for so long, for accepting it was time to quit, for getting back out there, and for all of the things you are doing to try and improve yourself.

Thanks for reading this far. I can’t wait to see you all soon.

As Chrissie Wellington always says “just because you’re homeless in a foreign country, you can still do a triathlon.” She’s never said those words exactly but I think the sentiment is implied. So, being in Dublin, I signed up for the Swim Smoith Naas Triathlon, a sprint distance race that takes place at the end of September.

It’s pool-based but still includes a 750m (30-length) swim followed by a 20k bike and 5k run. I had hoped that Trinity Triathlon Club would be racing there so there would be some friendly faces but they were off doing a freshers’ week bike ride so a solo adventure it would be (with my cheering squad in the car, of course!). Registration opened at 6:30 and bib numbers were handed out in order so I was number three. I then sat in my car for a while because I couldn’t find transition. Some poor lass was wandering backwards and forwards trying to find it before eventually a crowd gathered and led the way. There was supposed to be a map in the race handbook but it had been missed off.

Most of my triathlon gear is in the UK so I had to improvise: with no race belt I had to safety pin my number to a t-shirt I could pull on after the swim. I only received one number and four safety pins. Two of which I then dropped down the side of my gear stick to disappear forever. Which meant I had to pin my number to the front with only two pins and hope for the best.

The race briefing was late, which was great because then I didn’t feel guilty about a free-race wee even though I was supposed to be on the pool deck by then. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one. The start was a little chaotic. There were four people in each of the five lanes. But it was a mass start. And there are no overtaking mid-lane. I suggested we arrange ourselves in predicted swim times and this worked well. Despite the chaos, our lane marshall was lovely and I kept hearing her shout “go Chris” at the end of each lap.

I sprinted the last few lengths to get my heart rate up before emerging into the cool Irish morning air. It was freezing before the race, but luckily up to 8 degrees by the end of the swim. I didn’t have any of my fancy tri shoes so I had to sit down like a chump and tie my laces on the pair of bike shoe I did have in the country. I also pulled on some arm warmers and my race number t-shirt and was on my way. Even with all of that, I think I still went through T1 faster than some of my early races.

The bike course was reasonably flat. I came off the aero bars for a few of the hills but mostly I was able to stick it out. It was a simple out-and-back. Roads were not closed but there were garda at both ends slowing traffic (there wasn’t much) and when I stopped for a red light the marshalls instructed me to go straight through it. The road surface varied. At one point, my bike started shaking and I wondered whether I had a slow rear puncture. But then the road surface went silky smooth again and I realised that was the cause.

T2 involved more lace-tying and then I was off onto the run. This was also a simple out-and-back with very gentle hills. I didn’t have my super-shoes but my Hoka Bondis got me through. I warmed up on the run in my arm warmers and t-shirt over tri top but not to the point I was overheating. And certainly not enough for the old cup of water over the head trick at the 2.5k aid station.

Post-race goodies included a bottle of water, a banana and a t-shirt. It’s a nice technical shirt with thicker fabric on the front and back and more breathable fabric under the arms.

They didn’t hang around dismantling transition after the race. Most people still had their bikes checked in when they took the barriers away. However, it was a more relaxed event than most and there weren’t many expensive bikes in there. I’m used to being dominated by super-bikes but at this, mine was one of the higher end ones.

The race haven’t released any official results but according to my watch my time was:

1:21:37

And my splits were:

Overall, it was a fun event. A little bit more chaotic than British events but plenty of focus on safety: bikes were checked when racking, clear signage on the race course and plenty of marshalls. And all of those marshalls were very friendly. It’s a lovely way to end the season.