Derby Sprint Tri (www.punishingevents.com)Posted by gavinrigg06 on September 14th, 2009
Derby Sprint Tri was my last Tri event of the season, and my first back after my back injury in March – and what a great event to finish on. Hosted by Punishing Events (www.punishingevents.com) I entered at the start of the year at a cost of £30.
All the information needed was kept up to date on their website, and masses of information was available to download. There were over 600 entrants to this event, so I had visions of long queues to register etc, but how wrong was I…..Registration opened on the Sat but as I am not local I waited until the Sunday to register, the difference with this event was that everyone had been given their start times throuought the day and you could just turn up 30mins prior to racing as Registration and Transition stayed open and manned all day by several marshalls so no queue whatsoever.
So up at 7am for my Porridge then a 1hr drive to the event, all well signposted informing motorists of a cycle event, and loads of car parking quite close by, which was also manned all day by 2 marshalls. Got to the registration area, given my envelope and given all my instructions (this is when I found out it wasn’t chip timed – the only downside to the whole event).
Trotted over to the transition area, which was a entire rugby pitch – again manned all day by at least 2 marshalls, checking everyone for numbers in and out. Pool based swim so a walk round to the leisure centre – previous events had taught me to take flip flops so no dancing over stones to get to the pool.
My start time was 9:58 so I joined the queue at 9:40 and my wave actually went off at 9:48 (1 guy missed the wave) the usual 16 lengths of a 25m pool (6 lanes), max 4 swimmers in my lane at any time, a marshall at the end of each lane counting your lengths and dipping a 2 lengths to go board under the water for your last lengths – quite amazed to find I was first out of the water in my wave.
Quite a trek to T1, a bit like London !! then run the length of the rugby pitch to my bike, practice had made perfect as everything went smoothly, belt on, glasses on, helmet on grab bike and go…another long run to the bike mount point over what I thought was grass but actually had that plastic stuff underneath so was a bit sharp – jump onto the bike elastic band trick for shoes, staight out on to a hill, just over the brow and a slight decent so time to get my feet in my shoes, however some numpty had pressed the crossing button and run off so I had to stop for the lights or risk a 2min penalty and attempt to get my feet in my shoes, the lights changed and someone went flying past (Grrrrr) off again and started overtaking several people.
I had done a recce 2wks prior so knew the route and was flying round still overtaking people, 12km in and round a corner to find 5 people stopped on their bikes and a flock of sheep in the middle of the road !!!!!! (Grrrrr) got passed them eventually and pushed even harder to try and make the time back, the rest of the ride was uneventful until T2, comming up to the dismount line I thought about the sharp grass, so decided not to take my feet out of my shoes before dismount – big mistake, I could’nt unclip and crashed against the barriers, but managed to stay upright (Doh !)
Bike racked, other kit off, trainers on, another length of the Rugby pitch to the run start straight into an uphill section I thought I was going to need ropes to get up, pushed on to the top and thought it would level out as the organisers said it was flatter than last year !!….it finally leveled out at about 2km and I finally got my running legs back, then the fun bit, going back as it was now downhill, I started passing people which made me run faster, by the time I got to the finish I was running like Brownlee – crossed the line to my name and BCTTT handed a Drink, a Banana (nice touch) and a T-Shirt, a nice design in cream with every competitors name on the back. Only provisional results out so far, my target time was 1hr 20mins but finished in 1hr 16mins 14secs, so even with the traffic lights and the sheep I am pleased with a placing of 258th out of 600 (8mins off the top 100) that is good enough for me for this year.
A really well organised event, well marshalled, chip timing would make this event one of the best sprint events in the area.