Camlough/Crooked Lake Triathlon
5th June 2010
Camlough is my nearest venue for open water swimming, I had been down a couple of times with my coach, trying out my new wetsuit, and just generally getting used to swimming open water. I also had been around the course twice on the bike prior to the race, I made sure I knew the bike course well as I planned to be out of the water 1st and needed to know where I was going.
I knew Conor Murphy was going to be my biggest competition as he is a strong all rounder, so the tactics of this race was go out hard to try and get as much of a head start as I could and then let him chase me the whole way.
The swim went to plan I went out hard and soon realised I had created a bit of a lead, I just kept the pace up and tried to get away, was out of the water first, didn’t even bother to look back and see where anyone was, just ran and ran, transition was huge and I was at the far end. I heard my dad shout “8.30” so I knew nobody else was going to be on my tail at this point. The next big challenge was getting my wetsuit off, my new helix wetsuit was awful to get off quickly but thanks to a whole bottle of baby oil and half a tub of Vaseline it came off better than usual. The only draw back with so much lube was that once I went to get my bike shoes on, (still not attached to the bike) all that lube that was on my wetsuit was now on my hands. What made it worse was that I still used cycling shoes so trying to fasten three straps per shoe with extremely slippy hands was a discipline in itself.
The bike course is very hilly especially at the start, so I tried to use the advantage of being a good climber and also being on a road bike to get a bigger gap on the rest of the field. I really put everything into the cycle I knew Conor was nifty on the bike and I was constantly checking to see if he was gaining, but I never seen him.
I managed to make it into T2 still in first place. Transition was massive so I had a long run with the bike which was inconvenient, as I racked my bike I heard the commentator announce that Conor was into T2, I knew the race was now on!
The run course was just as bad as the bike course as soon as you’re out of transition your hit a hill, and not a very pleasant hill.
Part of the course you have to take a sharp left so I seen Conor, coming up fast and he looked like he was a man on a mission, so I tried to lift it to stay away. He finally came up on my shoulder and I wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
I tried to stay with him and did for a short period but, I had put far too much into the bike and I was now paying for it, so he went past with about 2km to go. It wasn’t over, I had no idea how close 3rd place was so I just gave everything just to hold onto second. I crossed the line and still had plenty of distance between 3rd but I wasn’t to know that at the time.
I love the fact that with an open water swim tri, u can cool off in the water afterwards – very refreshing! :)
All in all really pleased with this race, and happy that I am moving up the podium, just one more step to go!!! :)