Where: bowood house, wiltshire
When: 12 july 2015
Organiser: events logic
Course details: open water sprint distnace (super sprint also available)
Distance(s): 750 in bowood lake, (loooong t1), 13mi closed road bike, 5 trailish run
Marshalling: loads, all helpful, some coping with the weather better than others
Facilities: bowood house play area, cafe, portaloos, medics, massage
Technical: Chip timing, closed roads
Freebies: tech tshirt, medal, some beetroot drink thing
it's so good to actually have a tri season. 2013 was so im focussed i pretty much forgot to do any other races and 2014 was spent in physio. going back to shorter races has been great fun.
i am a weather jonah at the moment, though - three tri's and all of them now have featured appalling weather. torrential rain on race day is getting old hat. weather since cardiff has been lovely, bit windy but no real rain to speak of. until last night when it turned it and was forecast to spank it down all morning.
my form has been pretty good, and cardiff really felt like an marked improvement in how well i've been racing. i've not felt massively improved anywhere to be honest, but it's all coming together well. this race was another bit of press ganging from the friend who went to cardiff. she raced bowood last year and enjoyed it.
as i was off in the 1.30pm wave i went swimming first thing, then mucked about with vee at the pool before eventually bimbling over. skies gray, but not raining. bit windy, but it looked like i might dodge the showers for once! got there, racked up, arsed about a bit, met up with tri friend (she was off at 2pm) and then rolled down the hill to the lake. i was in the 5th wave of the day, last one for the sprint. just as we got into the water the rain started. ha ha ha. typical. i was glad i went for the wetsuit.
placed myself front and centre for the start, and off with a minimal amount of biff. a few 'reminders' to those considering swimming over my legs, a guiding hand one one closing in on my right shoulder. got a great line into the first buoy and by 1/3 distance was on my own in second. i could see the guide canoe not far away, but never close enough to catch them. out of the water in about 11:20, in second.
the run up to t1 is up a crazy long grass hill, possibly half a km or so. long way to go. i could see first place bloke and caught him in t1, where i chucked on some damp socks, grabbed all my usual bike crap and set off for a shockingly bad bike mount. within 20m i had to stop as i'd dropped my chain somehow. honestly. bike route was a 7lapper round the estate roads. bit twisty, bit turny, three or four 90degree bends. lots of covered speed bumps and cattle grids. very technical, not fast and in the pissing rain.
at 500m or so was the first 90 left - i scrubbed plenty of speed on the way in, picked a good line and as i turned the bike just shot out from under me. down on ankle, hip and back, tore my race number off. big shock, i wasn't cooking it and had taken a conservative line. got up, reacquainted the chain to the bike, checked the wheels and went to set off when the guy in third place came round, did the same thing as me and took me out. i set off in a fair funk, every bend was now a nightmare, every descent a deathtrap and anything resembling a fast bit of road probably the last thing i'd remember before the ambulance. a chap i know through vetty's after-school club came past and i couldn't stick with him.
the rain got heavier, my cornering twitchier and my mood darker. i gave up places on the bike that i wouldn't have dreamed off usually, but i couldn't trust the road anymore. after 5 laps i half crawled out of my funk and decided that the bike was gone - no need to stress - the energy you aren't expending on this you can use on the run. on lap 6 it absolutely pissed it down, rivers and huge areas of standing water all over the place.
into t2, the shoe switcheroo, and i set out out to hunt everyone down i could find. i had some spare gas in my legs and 5km to use them. i caught after-school club chap, and his tri-club mate, at about a mile, flying along with almost no thought as to if i could hold the pace. very traily, lots of muddy bits, gravel paths, undulating and twisty. good fun.
by the end i was suffering, but closing on what i thought was second place. i missed him by about 20 secs. the sun was out by now, as if to rub in the awful weather on the bike course.
finished in 1:22:37 - no splits yet, swim was 11:20ish (before the long run), bike 45 or so i think and run just under 20mins. all fairly good. well, mostly good apart from the bike.
winner was in 1:19:50 (msen) and i was top of my age group (35-39)! (no prizes for it though, but very nice to see). 70 raced on the sunday, i was 4th. there were identical races held yesterday (sprints and supersprints) and the times were much quicker - winner was 1:09 i think. the bike conditions probably contributed to most of that difference, you couldn't push hard on the course at all. i finished 22secs from third place and a proper gong! i think that if i hadn't come off i would have made that time up - as much because i wouldn't have been tiptoeing through every bend.
i got checked out my the medics after - my ankle and hip are quite grazed and bloody. my shoulder, back and arm are more surface scraping. sore but nothing lasting. i need to check the bike over and make sure there isn't anything that needs repair, but it ran ok the rest of the route. there were quite a few of us in the medics tent, all had come down in the same place. nearly identical damage to hips and shoulders. in hindsight i wonder if my wave caught the corner just when some grease or oil got lifted by the first showers of rain. i'm not a cyclist who takes big risks and i was being quite controlled into the corner, so for it go away like that was a huge shock - no gravel or leaves there to act as a slip plane. that the guy after me did the same makes me wonder.