faringdon triathlon – september 6 2009Posted by ris on September 10th, 2009

it was my first shot at this event, which has been going for 10 years or so. it’s a slightly odd distanced event, comprising 750m pool swim, 50k bike and 8.5k run. in the lead up to this race i wasn’t really getting into the idea of doing it, i was nursing a cold for a couple of days and have been more focussed on highworth sprint in a couple of weeks. in the end i decided i would use it as a bit of a training session, and in particular i wanted to try and use some different nutrition strategies (i’ve struggled with this before).

i think you can tell how flat a course is by the line up of bikes and at faringdon it was a sea of serious bike porn. i guessed that the winners would be setting some silly bike times and i wasn’t wrong the winner did that bit in 1:24 or something.

my swim was an disaster.  i’d been hoping to post between 12 and 13mins but my goggles went leaky again and i was stopping every 2 or 4 laps, almost for the whole set. they won’t be used again, and if it wasn’t for the fact that i really needed them at the time i’d have thrown them out of the pool. really fed up, particularly as they played up at bath and i thought they’d settled since. i was given a 15.07 split.

the bike was good, i really enjoyed long sessions on the tri bars and was came in at a 20mph average which i’m happy with. there were two signal controlled junctions that were manned to give people time back if they got held up. we were advised of this in the briefing and also asked to follow the rules of the road/highway code.

at a narrowed traffic calming area though, with no marshalls around, i got stuck in a queue while some cars let each other through. i lost maybe a minute, and another competitor past me on the pavement to get round it. when i caught him up he offered to vouch for me being stuck there and to his credit he went and found the race ref – who wasn’t interested, anyone could say the same he said. fair enough, but then don’t ask competitors to follow the rules of the road or endager themselves or others in bending them a bit.  i suggested they put marshalls on that junction next year.

i overtook a few people and was mainly taken by blokes on thrumming rear disc-ed uber-machines. bike and t1 time was 1:39:49, which differs from my bike clock, unsurprisingly by about a minute!

the run was a bit hopeless, the course is pretty hard with an 8% hill at about 3miles. i ran with someone else for a bit which was ok but eventually i stretched out a bit and finished a bit ahead of him. my time was a bit slower than training and previous races and a bit of that was trying eat on the bike again. early on the run my stomach was a bit tight and i din’t push as hard as i think i could. t2 and run was a 42:14.

total time 2:37:10, which put me 31 out of 89. not bad given i was mucking about a bit.

goodybag was good, tshirt, towel, some chocolate, water and a banana. all good! i enjoyed more than i thought i would and i may do it again – a better bike would earn me a few mins and i can’t possibly have such a bad swim and run again. roll on highworth and the yokelfest though, i’m going to throw everything at it.