Race Report - Inverurie Triathlon

Preview

I have done the sprint race at Inverurie Triathlon the past 3 years. Results for all three are here.

For this year:

I want to swim under 14 minutes. This should be easy enough. I haven't been in a pool for a month so my turns might be even more untidy than usual, but I still haven't done enough work to be tumble turning anyway. My basic swimming is going really well though, so barring traffic problems I should easily be out of the water in under 14.

The bike course was slightly different in 2010 so it isn't really comparable. And due to some road works and cable laying this year's route is going to be different again. Assuming it is a similar distance my aim is to not get caught by the guys from the fast heat by the time I get off the bike. That may be optimistic depending on how my breathing is. Still a bit affected by the cold on my run on saturday.

Also, it would be good to run under 20 minutes, but not really expecting that I have the basic speed in my legs. I have gone from 20:24 to 21:19 to 22:23 over the last 3 years. As long as I don't get another minute slower I will take it.

Race day

Woke up to an awful lot of noise. Was raining cats and dogs and occasional elephants by the sound of it. After the storms and flooding earlier in the week I had a good idea what that would mean for road conditions. 

A quick look out the window and the drains on my street were failing to handle the volume of water and were flooding the road. Wasn't going to risk the TT bike and the pointy hat on roads like that so rushed around packing my road bike and digging out my rain gear. 

By the time I got to registration it was fairly obvious that the bike was going to get cancelled. There was a bit of grumping from the bike specialists when it was announced and a good few of them took their refunds and went home in a sulk. Suited me though. Don't want to be taking risks on having a slide in bad road conditions this close to Knockburn and Aberfeldy. 

I had a nice clean swim. Because of all the late withdrawals there were only 3 of us in the swim lane. The first guy off was exactly my pace, so I could never get close enough to draft him, but he never got in my way. The other swimmer started behind me and we both caught her twice, but each time she was in a nice space between us and we each caught her near the turns so didn't hold either of us up.

Because of the single transition it was moved into the changing rooms. This meant that shoes would be nice and dry to start the run in, but changing time would go into the official swim time. This gave me an official swim time of 13:56. For a better comparison though, Garmin swim clocks me out of the water at 13:12.

The run was still pretty wet. Because I transitioned indoors, instead of outside where the normal transition is, the run was slightly longer than normal, and I started my garmin at that point. It clocks me as covering the run through the unused transition area and then the race as 3 miles exactly in 20 mins 58. Under 7 minute miles (just).

The official time check was taken at the same place as the normal triathlon T2 exit. So my official run time for just the run route is 19:41 to compare against the previous times above. Really happy with that. Even though it is based on having fresh legs from not biking, it wasn't as nice running conditions as any of the previous years. I have done no speed work at all this year. Bodes well for having a decent race at Knockburn next week.

14th out of 43 finishers in the Sprint race. 5th Senior Male. Pretty happy.