Quarteira European Cup 2015

Well that’s the 1^st race of the 2015 season done, it is the earliest I have raced before but it is good to get the season kicked off.

I really didn’t think I would be racing this early this season due to my Uni commitments. After taking last year out of university for the Commonwealths I returned in September straight after World Champs to finish my final year. This year has been quite demanding with me having to complete my final placement in a Primary School for 10weeks before Christmas and then complete my dissertation after Christmas – which I handed in the night before I flew out for this race. It hasn’t been a normal winters training, reduced volume and fitting it around everything has been a big difference from last year when I was completely free to train whenever and wherever.

I managed to be in reasonable shape - not as fit as I would have liked to be when racing - but I was happy enough considering what I was doing at the same time. 

… but anyway, enough of the Uni talk …

This was my 2^nd time racing in Quarteria, (last year being the 1^st) and I was glad to be back, it’s a well organized raced on a great course. Nice rough wavy swim, bike course with good short, steep hill every lap and a flat fast 10k run to round it off.

Last year I had a good swim-bike and rubbish run, so the plan this year was to keep the swim-bike the same and finish off with a good run this time.

1^st race of the season is all about blowing the cobwebs away and making the mistakes now rather than more important races during the season and I think I made enough mistakes in this race for the whole season, you would have thought I had never raced a triathlon before.

I made a hash of the beach start, somehow managing to do a front flip as soon as hit the 1^st wave which put me at the back and a nightmare to try and swim through. Constant bad positioning resulted in me getting battered throughout the swim, once again not using my potential in a swim coming out well down.

It was now just a case of resurrecting the race once I got onto the bike -  I managed to stay out of trouble on the bike and conserved energy as I wasn’t 100% sure of how good my cycling legs were, thankfully they were ok and got off the bike with the majority of the field.

Didn’t have a great t2, which resulted in me loosing out on some easy places, but put an ok run together to finish a reasonable 18^th.

The aim of the game is to beat your start number – I was ranked 17^th finished 18^th; which is annoying but I am happy to get the 1^st race out of the way. Now to get back into to some solid training so that I can beat my start number by a considerable margin next time.

Big thanks to Stephen Delaney and Stephan Teeling Lynch, it’s always great to have support staff out to make everything run smooth – thanks for the help.

Lakeland Bikes Enniskillen, cheers for getting me my old race bike to me for this race, makes racing easier when on top class equipment, great to be working with you again this season.

It was also my 1^st race as an On-Running sponsored athlete, it is great to be racing in awesome shoes.