Thursday 15 May 2008

Dorchester Race Report

The weather on Sunday was wonderful for my first race of the season.

Preparation is vitally important for these events so on Saturday I was up nice and early to go and eat bacon butties, drink beer, and watch Morris Dancing. This is not the usual preparation prescribed in all the training manuals but family life and triathlon training don't always gel in quite the way I would like.


Race day was Sunday so I was up bright and early. Dorchester is not too far away and I had spent most of Saturday night fussing over my kit so I had nothing to get ready. I just grabbed a bowl of cereal and then set off in the car. Thankfully, I managed to find the leisure centre in Dorchester with no problems so I had plenty of time to rack my bike, register and then wander around for a while.

The race itself went quite well. Not quite as fast as I would have liked but not too bad. My swimming has improved a lot over the winter and before the race I estimated my swim time for the 400m pool swim at 7:00 minutes. According to the provisional results my swim time was 28:01. My suspicion is that this is not quite right, especially since my time for the 15 mile bike leg (22.73km according to my Garmin) was published as 23:34 and that was only the 5th fastest of the day! My run time of 27:07 for 4 miles sounds about right though the run leg was tough, it was starting to get very hot though I managed to push myself hard right till the end of the race.

Not many people managed to come past me on the run but rather more managed to on the bike leg. Obviously I need a proper (more expensive) triathlon specific bike to complement my current road bike. So no more horses Sarah!

All in all a good race expect that an ex-rugby playing friend of mine beat me by 4 minutes, the silly old bugger. It was good to catch up with him after the race though.

Swim - 400m + transitions - 8:48
Bike - 22.73km - 42:33
Run - 5.73km - 27:21

Total - 1:18:42

1 comment:

Doris said...

WOW! Great times, bet you can't wait for that Oly... and I can honestly understand the whole bike thing.... !!