Triatlon de Elcehe Arenales

Race Report

The Sunday before this race I had raced ICAN Malaga Triathlon where I manage to get on the podium which was great and I was really pleased with that. However I think I underestimated how much doing two 70.3s on consecutive weekends take out of me as I felt like death warmed up until like the Friday, where I started to feel better and then on the Saturday I actually felt pretty good and thought I might have timed it o.k for the race. on Saturday before the race I actually felt quite good and went into the race feeling confident.

The race started off pretty quick but I felt as though I was swimming well and at the first buoy didn’t seem as though I was to far behind the leaders, then at the buoy we took a sharp turn and then had to swim through some of the stragglers in the Women’s race which started 5 minutes before. This caused Carnage and broke the pack up which I was swimming in, also for the rest of the swim I had to swim by myself which wasn’t ideal.

Out onto the bike and for the first few kilometers I felt o.k, but then after that it just felt hard going. I don’t really know what else to describe it as really apart from it just felt hard and like a real slog. I had the SRM on the TT bike and new after half way that I was finding it harder then I should. I kept plugging away and by the end of the bike I got off with a group of guys going for 5th place.

At the start of the run I actually felt pretty good, I heard someone say that 2nd place was only 2 minutes ahead which made me think o.k maybe this isn’t so bad and I might be able to get another podium. The run at this race was really tough as it was a 2 lap course where you had to run up a biggish hill which included about 50-60 steps twice and a beach section of about 300 meters where you were running on soft sand. It was a cracking course and one that if you were going well, you would love and if you were hanging on it would be an absolute nightmare.

Up until around 4k I was feeling good, I was leading the group and feeling strong then all of a sudden the lights went out. It was so bizarre, horrific, I just lost all energy and in the space of about 1 Kilometer I lost about 40 seconds. I went through a big dark patch at this time and thought f**k it I’m going to stop, I got a podium this last week I’ll just call it a day for this race, It doesn’t matter!

The problem with actually calling it a day was that I was now half way round the lap so was 5 kilometers from transition so it would have taken ages to walk there and would have been so embarrassing. Its points like this in races where you have to really dig in, at first I just tried to limit my losses to two of the guys who were just in front of me and then after about a mile I started to feel better and then started to catch them. Eventually I overtook them, I just thought to myself, if you give 100% you can’t do anymore then that so that’s just what I did. I could have pulled out and moped around but I tried to pull myself together and just give it my best shot on the day.

I eventually finished 8th and was only 2 minutes off 2nd place which wasn’t to bad in the end considering my power on the bike was 27 watts lower then the previous week and this was a shorter bike course, and my run was only 2 minutes off the fastest split of the day. In hindsight 2 races one week apart wasn’t the best thing to do at the start of the year but they were both close to where I was staying in Spain and I thought it was worth the shot.

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