No training ....

France holiday week 1. Returned from Cornwall after vegging out from the Sprint Tri, packed the car and off to the Alps. 1 Espace, 1 roof box, 5 bikes, 3 kids, 1 wife and me. Amazing what you can attach to a car nowadays.

2 days later, much shouting at the kids and we arrived in the Les Get. Straight into the Lake for a bit of open water swim training (200m), a tad cold but OK. Same old problem with swimming though, I need to practice more.

Out with the bikes. Mine is a classy 15 year old £99.00 steel mountain bike with tag along for Sophie. (not a desirable machine) and awful hard to make move. But Sophie likes it, sitting at the back, singing songs.

Next was running at altitude training. So I ran the final incline up to Ranfoilly (400yards at 1800m) and I was 'puffed out'. Was it the mountain Crocs I ran in, or the altitude.

Then down to Lac Leman and I saw a 'Dorking Ten' tee shirt!!! 150m Sprint training after lunch, the running Crocs absolutely helped me beat Oliver over this distance, although he did take off faster than me. Biked around (tagging Sophie, in 1st gear to keep the cadence up, just to make it difficult), then we all jumped into an open air swimming pool. 50m pool and I knocked out 500m, feel good to have done this.

**** I am a Triathlete ****

I am a triathlete. Sunday 8am and I lined up with 153 others in Hayle pool, Cornwall, a locked in tidal pool, 19 degrees C. My strategy was to 1, lurk at the back. 2, don't die. 3, swim in the right direction. Here I am, lurking at the back so that I don't get kicked and staying close to a canoe for safety. The horn went and the swim started. Head down, water not too cold to breathe, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, breathe ......... Hey, I'm still alive, hey this is good. Quick where are the bubbles to follow? Head up, look about, ahhhh, I'm heading in the wrong direction! Quick back on track. Stroke, stroke, breathe ...... Put my head up again. Ummm, everyone seems to be ahead of me! Who is behind me? Whats that, what its all the breast-strokers behind me. Ohhhhh no, I'm swimming with the breast-strokers! I must get in more swim practice. Finally I too had swum 750m. Here I am coming out. Awesome I look like I might know what I'm doing, notice the breast-sroker still in the water behind me.


Onto transition (T1). Run out of the water, undoing wetsuit, (stagger out of water on wobbly legs, fiddling with zip), strip off wetsuit, (how hard can a wetsuit be to take off? Get off my ankles will you, when did someone glue this thing to my ankles?), put helmet on, (who twisted the straps around?), unrake bike, (easy) run out of transition, (owww my feet on the stones), jump on bike, feet in shoes, and cycle. (feet in shoes, go on feet, in you get, why does the shoe not stop turning around? ohhh quick pedal before you fall off, right do up the binding, arghhhh, next time I put the shoes on the feet first.



And I'm off, 20km on the bike, swig the juice and crack on and please, please don't let anyone on a mountain bike overtake me. The bike went quite well, I did overtake a number of people, including 2 people with aerobars. Coming back into Hayle was all down hill, definately would have been good to have aerobars here. This is me coming into T2. Notice feet still in shoes! Thats because I can't get the shoe fastenings undone. Notice 50yds to go before I need to get off. What am I going to do, get my feet out or fall off? I went for the unclip and run in the shoes option. Racked the bike ahead of the woman ahead of me in the picture, then had to take my helmet amd shoes off, and put my trainers on. The woman was off out of T2 before I had my trainers on. Note to self - Elasticated laces, enough said.


Heres me starting the 5km run. The last leg, 5km run, ohhh I've left my garmin on the handlebars, dohhh. How hard can a 5km run be? Well about as hard as the final 5km of a marathon. 'Come on legs, forwards, back, forwards, back. No, no, not round and round, that was the last leg'. Notice in the picture my pre-race strategy of 'no socks', that was a mistake. Within 200 metres I had rubbed a hole in my left ankle.

5km later and I crossed the finish line. I am a triathlete.

Here's the statistics:

Swim (inc T1) 19:48
Bike (inc T2) 43:19
Run 25:09
Total 1:28:18
Place 105 (153 total)

As the song says: 'Things can only get better', and that means swimming more, building some cycling leg muscles and brick sessions.