Nottingham Sprint – Race Report

So last weekend was the Nottingham Sprint Triathlon at the National water sports centre, which marked my first open water triathlon of the year. It consisted of a 750m swim at one end of the rowing lake, a 4 lap 20km bike around the lake and a 5km run also around the lake to finish off.

As there were around 1200 competitors due to race on Saturday, we were split into 5 waves throughout the day, with the first starting at 7.30am. I was placed in this wave, the joys of this sport! This meant a 3.30am wake up before having a large bowl of porridge and a cup of tea!  My kit was packed and we left the house at 5am for the 50 min drive to Nottingham.

On arrival I registered and took my kit down to the transition area. This is slightly unusual compared to most other triathlon’s as there were 2 separate transition areas, one for T1 (swim to bike) and another for T2 (bike to run), so we now had to remember 2 different places where our kit was placed. Luckily I managed to find both my transition spots easily in the race.

I’d finished racking my kit at 6.45 and had my final food before the race, a chocolate bar. I’ve always done this before races and I won’t be stopping soon! It was then on with my new Zone3 Aeroforce 220 tri-suit and my Orca wetsuit over the top of that. With 15 mins to go we had the race briefing and I took on board a gel.

Before I knew it we were in the water (around 14 degrees!) and the countdown had started. I’d managed to get myself just behind the first line of swimmers and it was a fast start, with arms and legs flailing all over the place. It was a fairly physical first 350m of the swim, but nothing I wasn’t used to having used to play rugby at school. I settled into a good rhythm and got round the 2 marker buoys without too much issue other than getting a bit squished! It was then onto the swim back to transition, and I began overtaking a few people before coming out of the water in 10.45, a new PB for an open water swim!

I then tried to unzip my wetsuit. And tried again. It took me quite a while to get it unzipped, and then the left leg of it got bunched up around the timing chip so it took even longer to get off. This lead to a very slow T1 of 1.06, and a lot of people I had beaten in the swim had caught up because of this. I managed to get my helmet and number belt on quickly and ran out of transition, on my bike and was off, overtaking people right from the start.

I felt strong on the bike, overtaking all but 2 people in the first few km’s and keeping a high speed up. It wasn’t the smoothest of courses with a fair few pot holes, bumpy tarmac and the addition of geese to dodge around all adding to the fun! I was then caught up by 2 others in my AG and we caught one of the other 2 still out in front. This was where it got a bit tricky, as we were all going about the same speed and keeping our distance, but were getting bunched up going past back markers. The narrow roads of the second part of the lap only made this worse, and nearing the end of the 4 laps it was terrible. We couldn’t get past a slow group of cyclists nearing the last corner, so had to sit up and inevitably bunch up a bit. Although we didn’t know it at the time, 3 of us got a 2 min drafting penalty, and the evidence they had of that was from that last section of the course. Nightmare.

Off the bike and it was a long run through T2 to my spot, where it took 2 attempts to rack my bike as it fell off the first time! I slipped on my shoes, grabbed my run watch and set off on the run with the group of 4 others I’d come off the bike with. I had a good T2 of 44s.

3 of us got a bit of a gap to the other 2, but I then dropped off and was overtaken by one of the others. When I looked at my watch later I saw we had been running 3:10/km pace, no wonder I couldn’t hold it! Oops. I kept looking at my watch and saw my pace gradually slowing until I got to the last 2km and I could just about make out the finish line in the distance, and didn’t want to get overtaken by anyone else. I increased my leg turnover and finished the run.

 

The banner over the line said 59.10 as I crossed it. Result I thought to myself, my first sub-hour full distance sprint. However I went to the results board inside and saw my number with a 2 min drafting penalty beside it, taking me up to 1.01.10. I was fairly annoyed to say the least, but I didn’t particularly want to pay the £15 appeal fee when they’d probably have a video of us on that last section and wouldn’t have backed down about the penalty.

My final splits were: Swim – 10.45, Bike – 28.22, Run – 18.13

Overall – 1.01.10 – 54th / 826 finishers. 5th AG.

 

Without the penalty I’d have been 18th overall and 3rd in the AG, but I can’t change anything now. In hindsight I wished I’d pushed a bit harder on the first 2 laps of the bike as I feel I could have gone quicker and would have likely avoided the penalty. I have seen a photo of one of the later wave’s penalty sheet, and think it highlights more than just an athlete problem when there are over 25 drafting penalties in one wave! Thats more than a tenth of the athletes. The course narrowing certainly doesn’t help, but the fact you have around 240 athletes on 5km of tarmac at the same time is a recipe for problems. Hey ho, not a lot I can do about that!

All in all I was happy with the day, having PB’d my swim, massively PB’d the bike and come close to my PB on the run. I was a bit slow in T1 but this should come down with practice, I hadn’t raced in my wetsuit since September! I consider it to be my best performance in a triathlon to date, and it’s set me up for a good next few races 🙂

 

Thanks as usual to Blair Davies for his coaching, and also to Torq Fitness  and Compressport for your continued support of the race team and for providing us with some great products that keep us training, racing and recovering well. Thanks also to Zone3 for providing me with such a great tri-suit to race in, it really is comfy!

One final thanks to Tom at iPrintStuff (www.iprintstuff.co.uk) for printing up my Zone3 suit and my Zerod GB AgeGroup suit for me, they look great and its really good quality! Much cheaper than other companies too 🙂

I’m now looking forward to the Deva Standard distance triathlon in Chester this Sunday (8th June), which will be my first standard distance and is also a qualifier for the world championships in Edmonton, Canada later this year. I’ll be interested to see how my form transfers to the longer distance! After that, it is now just 16 days till the ETU Sprint Champs in Austria which I am very much looking forward to!

 

Thanks for reading and happy training 🙂