Looking at the weather forecast the night before was not encouraging. The BBC had 25 mph crosswinds and rain.
Race preview here.
Updated Results here.
I was drawn in the same lane as two guys I raced at Turriff and two others with similar swim times. I hate Peterhead pool, it has funny undercurrents and the walls are not particularly grippy for turns, and the shallow end is very shallow. Compared to Turriff the same two guys didn't lap me this time. This was partly me going faster, but I think partly them going slower as well. Again I abandoned the tumble turns quite early. Still need to work on them at full pace. I got passed by the guy behind me, but I then managed to drop the last guy in our lane, and I managed to keep enough ahead of the three in front that they didn't get round to lap me. Swim time 12:36, not as fast as I wanted, but inside my predicted time of 12:40 and faster than Turriff, so going in the right direction. Edit: This was actually a 750m swim PB but I hadn't even noticed because I think I should be going even faster.
T1 was pretty shocking. I went through everything in order, but doing gloves and socks cost me too much time. They were necessary for the cold though.
It turned out the BBC had the weather pretty much spot on. The rain had eased while we were in the pool but the road surface was still damp and the wind was pretty strong. I decided to go with the TT helmet, which in hindsight was the wrong choice. I started off ok, I caught a couple of places on the way out, but I was using a lot of the road to fight the wind. At one point there is a small stone bridge and I had to go into it angling to crash over the side and then let the wind carry me over. That was right on the line of what I felt was safe behaviour.
Trying to ride into the crosswind being blown to the verge was tough, bordering on dangerous. In a couple of places I was pushed onto the verge, fortunately they were both quite smooth and I was able to steer back onto the road without a problem. But this shredded my confidence and I had to back off and just try to handle the bike rather than ride it fast. This actually made things worse as the TT bike is very unstable when it isn't going fast so slowing made things worse rather than better.
In a couple of places I was getting so frustrated I even took to swearing at the wind as if that might help. I was very tempted just to climb off the bike, but it was too cold and too far to walk it back. So I would have just had to climb back on it after I had a strop so I stayed on it.
On the return leg of the bike my heart rate actually dropped by 20bpm as I was simply trying to keep the bike on the road rather than push it along at anything approaching race pace. Bike time 42:45.
T2 was very slick. Despite chatting away to the organiser about how dodgy the bike course was in the wind I was still in and out in 26 seconds. Equal fastest time through T2.
Onto the run I felt quite good. As usual on triathlon runs my stride length was terrible, but my turnover was good and the pace was better than I expected. I had seen one of my targets leave transition just as I arrived and I set off to chase him. I got out through the first mile before seeing any of the leaders coming back. This meant I was within a mile of the winner. I figured I was probably about 11th at this point but as I passed people coming back in it turned out there were only 7 ahead of me. That meant catching one more would get me the same place as last year.
After the turn though I spotted two guys behind me who were going faster than me and I had to worry about them catching me as well. I pushed on as hard as I could but I couldn't make any inroads into the guys in front, and I had to start checking over my shoulder. Run time 19:02.
Time overall was 1:16:55. About 3 minutes slower than I wanted, but the bike alone was 3 minutes slower. And all of the cyclists were slower. Comparatively I actually did better than usual against most of them. The better bike handlers (or better equipped for the crosswinds, I didn't get a chance to check their bike set-ups) still went a few minutes quicker than me, but a few of the others were around my time or slower.
Finished 8th against a much stronger field than last year. Pretty happy all round, just the bike wasn't particularly enjoyable.
No comments:
Post a Comment