Oh great!

 So.

I'm not racing tomorrow after all.

Very unimpressed.

The tickboxes for the race were being able to have a good crack at going quickly and have a go a beating last year's time, while managing risk on the bike leg.  Not sure I can tick either box after an incident on Friday on the course where a bus went under the main pedestrian bridge from the outer palace grounds into the main athlete transition area, that was over-height and damaged the bridge.  It's the only route through to transition from outside the race and is unusable.

 

 

So the race director has implemented a marshalled mandatory dismount zone on part of the bike course where the bridge crosses the bike course and pedestrians/spectators need to cross the bike course.  All athletes have to slow down, stop, get off their bikes, walk 10m, get back on and carry on around the bike route... 3 times each in the race.  I've seen race footage and it looks bloody awful.  At any given time there could be a good 400 athletes on the bike loop which is about 6.6km long and as the race is started in waves there are cyclists on the course who are on any of the 3 laps... so at any time at the dismount or re-mount line there are 10-15 cyclists in the least stable state of getting on/off/tottering about in cycling shoes.  That, plus the fact that the race attracts a high proportion of first-timers there's a good 75% of the field have never raced before or have certainly never raced where there are a lot of other athletes in close proximity.  I'm not sure what other option the race director had, but there are going to be a lot of athletes turning up to today's and tomorrow's race waves who won't know until they get to the swim briefing.  There's going to be a lot of cross people and perhaps offering to allow people to withdraw and get at least a partial refund would have been a good gesture.

Basically, sod that.  I'm not having someone ride up my backside or stop/wobble/fall off right in front of me and cause me to crash; it's bad enough having that risk at the start and end of the bike leg, but adding in 6 instances of it during the race?  Also, slowing down, stopping, getting off, walking, getting back on and then starting up again on one of the quicker parts of the bike course not once, or twice, but three times during the race will add up to minutes to the overall race time.  Where personal best times are often measured in parts of minutes, that's just no fun any more.  Most people aren't racing the rest of the field, they're racing themselves.  I'd've been doing both.
Someone has taken short videos of the area from today's racing...

Dismount:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-89QyxUB48&feature=youtu.be
Remount:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8u8OR3dGjg&feature=youtu.be

It came around a bit quickly

It's time for Blenheim sprint triathlon again.  My god that came around quickly, but my god so much has happened since last year.

I've become an Ironman, smashed my collar-bone, been made redundant, fundamentally changed my diet, run my first Ultra Marathon, started a new job, struggled with time prioritisation and motivation... and yet I'm here again, 24 hours before Blenheim, and it's going to be great!

 Having remembered the zoomy bit through the forest and the gently undulating bike course a little with rose-tinted glasses, I thought I might race tomorrow on my TT bike.  Then I remembered A. the more than a couple of tight, narrow bends; and B. the high volume of "fun", slower and new-to-the-sport athletes you get a Blenheim.  With my less than perfect handling skills, there'd be no point being on a TT bike as I'd be up on the hoods 95% of the time to cover the brakes.  So... the Jets go onto my lovely, tried-and-trusted Fuji Team Pro Special Edition road bike (2010) and some clip-on tri-bars in case I get to have some fun through the woods.

And the wheels sound -yummy- :o)

I'm heavier and less endurance fit than this time last year and in some ways a lot less stressed than I was on the day of Blenheim last year (I was on a conference call for a critical incident at work for 4 hours and right up until I'd finished racking my bike etc. and then back on it again 15 minutes after I'd finished. The preceding weeks and months at work had not been fun at all.)  But my running has come a long way in terms of technical skills and I'm oddly a lot more comfortable on the bike at the moment, even after months off it and the comfort has happened only in the last 3 weeks really.  That said, with the Jets on the Fuji it's really quite... fiesty compared with having the Mavics on.  Who'da thunk it that wheels made such a difference on a pretty average road bike?



I'm in two minds about how tomorrow might pan out.  The swim isn't going to be spectacular as I'm, sure the lake is hellishly cold and I can't say I've spent a huge amount of time in the pool in the last 10 months so I'm not expecting a stellar performance there.  My transition skills are somewhat rusty, but hey all I have to do is rip off a wet-suit, pop on bike shoes, race belt, helmet and glasses in T1; swap bike shoes for trainers, take off helmet and turn around race belt in T2... how hard can that be?  The bike will be fun as I'm sure the course profile will come flooding back once I'm on it and with 3 laps the 2nd and 3rd will be faster through familiarity.  And the run is all about starting off high cadence and wanting to do well.  I know I can hurt a lot more than I used to be able to and I know that I can push a lot harder than I have in the past, but the important thing is to want to.  If I want to do well, I can push oh so hard and hurt quite a lot.  The thing is, it's UK 70.3 next weekend and I don't want to crash or break myself in some way this close to that.  So it's risk management on the bike and then mash it on the run.

See you on the other side!

Maintaining between Ironmans

This is the difficult bit between races.  Having completed UK 70.3 and Ironman UK, there's a real mental slump before the next race is due.  The inital challenge of the distance has been met and nobody died.  Nobody fell off or cramped or was sick or too dehydrated or grazed, blistered or bruised.  There is no "let's go faster at the next one" because they're so close together and the risk of not finishing Ironman Wales is too high to lamp it at any point in that race.

It's proving a bit difficult to keep the momentum up in this maintenance period.  There's no real gains to be made during the recovery period after Ironman UK and then it's already time to taper a bit for Ireland 70.3.  So the key at the moment is to keep things ticking over and stop thinking about anything other than a well managed race.

I think I'd be buggered without a coach at this point.  I'd either do almost nothing or far too much/too hard.  This was always going to be the challenge with the Ultimate Ironman Challenge - getting around all four races safely and without making a mess of it and getting injured towards the end.  With Rich coaching me, I'm 100% confident in doing that from a physical readiness point of view.  The only thing I'm really worried about... is something happening in a race that's outside of my control, like someone crashing into me on the bike course and breaking me or my bike.  *fret*