It is strange to go into a race knowing that you don’t intend to finish, well this was the case with the Strathclyde Elite Men’s Triathlon at the end of May. I entered the race knowing that I wouldn’t do the run leg because I had not started back to running this year, the height of my running involved 15mins easy on grass to build up a little impact into my leg. This would have been a major jump if I was to go from that to a 5km max off a bike. Never the less I still did the swim and bike because I believed that I would gain invaluable experience, especially elite open water swimming.
I was very pleased with how my race went, my swim may not have been exactly how I would have like, this was because the way pontoon was positioned compared to the first buoy. There is an extreme disadvantage to someone with a name like ‘WHITE’ being at the end of the alphabet. The buoy was inline with left hand edge of the pontoon where as I was positioned on the far right meaning I had a good bit further to swim across. It just means that in the future I will have to be good enough to be seeded in the top ten because I can’t exactly change my name.
On top of this I have to admit I had missed a lot of swimming the week before resulting in losing a bit of an edge which all added up to be missing front pack on the bike. The bike leg was ok, the group wasn’t catching the leaders and wasn’t working overly fantastic, as I wasn’t doing the run I decided to do a lot of work on the bike to see what level my biking was at, so I did a lot of work on the front of the pack. Was very pleased with my new bike, very reactive looking forward to racing on it much more.
I ran out of transition, and was fighting with myself telling myself that I need to stop and not do any damage to the leg but with my competitive personality made this extremely difficult, I ended up stepping off because I have been so patient with the injury it would be such a waste to ruin it all now by doing something stupid.
A very enjoyable race, just would have loved to do the full thing. Not long now!
No comments:
Post a Comment