It was hard to stop after Bolton. I was so used to having a training programme to follow it felt really strange to have no plan, no structure and no goal to aim at. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to have a break but going cold turkey wasn’t really an option.
We went for a week’s holiday in Crete at the end of July. Timing was perfect. Sitting by a pool was definitely in order. It was also right next to the beach so I managed to get plenty of sea swims in as well as chilling out. I managed to burn to a crisp as normal even with Factor 50 being slapped on every day. I’m clearly not made for sunbathing.
After the holiday the next Tri challenge was the National relays at Nottingham Water Sports Centre at Holme Pierrepont. I’d done this a couple of times before with the Lichfield Tri lads, but I was competing with Leicester this time. It was nice to have something different to aim for. I hadn’t done any sprint events for some time, so getting stuck in to some speed work made a nice change.
Training was fairly disorganised but I decided to follow a similar pattern I had in build up to Ironman. I included some tempo efforts to try and get my 5k run time down and interval work on the bike. It’s not so hard to build this in to my daily routine as opposed to 6 hours on the bike and 20 mile runs. No 3am starts this time round.
For the race itself, I was in a team of people I’d never met before. I quite liked that. It was an opportunity to get to know some other club members and mix it up a bit. There was some good banter beforehand from the group about the order. I was down to go third which was fine by me. I wasn’t really fussed to be honest, I was happy to be racing.
The format is teams of four with each person swimming 500m in the rowing lake, followed by cycling 15k (3 laps of the lake) and running 5k (1 lap of the lake). It’s a good sprint distance meaning you can go all out on each leg. It’s a challenge with the swim transition trying to spot your teammate in a sea of similar wetsuits, hats and goggles. Particularly when you’ve only just met them. It basically descends in to shouting a lot and gesturing wildly to attract the attention of the other person. Good fun though.
We got off to a great start. Our strongest swimmer, Patrick, went first and he smashed it. He was leading at one point but got ducked by a competitor behind him. I took over from Rob before passing on to Josh on the last leg.
I was really pleased with how it went, particularly the run. I was hoping for a 20 minute 5k and managed 20.37. It was nice to overtake people for a change. I’m used to getting reeled in on the bike after a good swim, but I was picking people off myself this time. Good for the ego! Rob was the fastest on the bike, he was clearly a good time triallist.
We came 2nd out of the Leicester teams, and 9th in our category. None of us were really bothered about that though, it was just a good club day out.