Bournemouth International Triathlon 2006

Bournemouth International Triathlon
Bournemouth, Dorset – Sunday 2nd July 2006
Sprint Distance – 750m swim / 20km bike / 5km run
Part 2 of The Treble 2006

Round two took me to the lovely seaside resort of Bournemouth famous for being a retirement spot for old folks and hosting the Conservative party conference. I was quite ill with food poisoning after Windsor and at one stage I was in hospital on a drip. I had hardly trained since then and I only decided a few days before that I was going to race, mainly because I was too tight to loose my entry fee and the deposit I had already put on the hotel room.

The weather was extremely hot and due to the England football teams inevitable exit from the World Cup on penalties the day before, there was a slightly uneasy feeling in the town. Luckily I kept a low profile and managed to stay out of trouble even though two drunk guys tried to throw a kebab at me as I cycled to the start at 5.30am on Sunday morning. Sadly I didn’t have time to stop and eat it.

The swim was in the sea and I wasn’t worried about this aspect of the race at all. I managed to deal with the waves, currents, rip tides, jellyfish, killer whales, sharks, and the mighty Kracken with the minimum of fuss. I was pretty worried about a sea swim particularly as I had heard horror stories of the current changing mid swim. It was actually pretty calm and I didn’t lose as much ground on the other swimmers early on as I normally do. I was only when I turned back into the shore that I was really struggling. I could barely lift my arms to open my wetsuit as I ran along the beach. In the end I had to use my left arm to assist my right arm to undo the zip.

The bike leg began on a rather step hill leading out of town. Luckily a friend had briefed me on it so I was ready leaving my bike on the small ring in transition. Other chaps weren’t not so lucky. One guy just ahead of me took off on the big ring and was stumbling all over the place with his gears making a horrible crunching noise as he tried to turn the peddles. One of the marshals shouted across to him that he was in the wrong gear. He didn’t seem to appreciate this too much and told the marshal he didn’t need to be told what gear to use. It was about this point when his chain came flying off and he almost fell off on to the pavement just as I passed him. I may or may not have heard the marshal snigger.

The bike course went out from town and down a dual carriageway to Ringwood and back. I found it all a little scary with cars whizzing past at 60mph, sometimes on both sides. The field was quite strung out and there wasn’t the usual amount of drafting going on. I thought I was doing OK but I was pretty disappointed with completing the 20km distance in 43 minutes. Considering I did a 56 minute bike leg at Windsor for 29km it wasn’t too clever even by my standards.

By the time I started the run along the sea front the sun was beating down. I felt pretty wasted by this point and I felt I was running on stumps. Strangely I seemed to be running pretty well to cross the line in 1:28:56. This is a reasonable result taking into account how ill I had been for the weeks leading up to it. Another good thing was that I didn’t seem at all sore afterwards – could this mean I was actually quite fit?!?

I think sprint distance seems to quite suit me as I’m not too far behind after the swim as I am over an Olympic distance. I feel a lot stronger than last year so it will be interesting to see what happens at London now. To get under 3hrs I’m going to need to improve by 16 minutes from last year which is going to be pretty tough.

Fingers crossed!