Not finding my sea legs in the South Hams

I had my friend Vikki to thank for my alarm going off at 5:15am on Sunday morning as I had taken a last minute place off her for the South Hams sprint tri, as she was going away with work. As it was (fairly) local and wouldn’t involve over-night accommodation, I decided to squeeze it in as a confidence booster before what was originally planned as my ‘A’ race of the season: the Dambuster next week. (For various reasons, it’s been demoted in value, but that’s for another post after the event!) Mainly, I just wanted to get back out there and enjoy a triathlon again, after feeling supremely cold, wet and miserable at the Slateman and considering never doing one again!

It was a stressful day on several counts. First of all, my supporter in chief, aka, my husband, had cricket, so couldn’t accompany me. My second wave supporters, aka, the parental units, were therefore drafted in. Whilst my Dad loves watching me compete, he isn’t a fan of early starts, and so he decided that we’d have more than enough time if we left at 6:15am to get to the venue in time for the close of registration at 7:30am. I thought even 6am was pushing it, and I was right! Once you get off the A38, the roads that lead to the South Hams are rural, and slow! I was getting increasingly agitated as the clock struck 7am and we weren’t even at Totnes yet! I then realised I’d forgotten to transfer my energy snacks from my car to my parents. I get blood sugar dips and so for me, going from breakfast at 5:30am to finishing the race four hours later is too long to go without food! The only thing we had in the car was a banana. Now, anyone who knows me well will know my thoughts on these. I had a dilemma: risk crashing into the proverbial wall half way through the event if I had nothing, or somehow force this vile substance down my throat and, chiefly, somehow keep it down. Pinching my nose, squealing, singing to myself, and punching the car seat, I opted for the latter. One banana consumed: possibly my greatest achievement of the entire day!

We pull into the carpark with 3 minutes to spare before registration closes. There is a substantial queue for registration and I join the back of it. It’s a slow moving queue. 7:40am and I’ve advanced 2 places. I’m in the first wave and due to swim at 8am. My kit is still in the car, I’ve not yet got my number and timing chip, and I don’t even know where the car is as I dived out to join the queue. Stress levels rising. I knew 6:15am was too late.

Finally, I see my Dad sauntering over. I shout instructions at him to go and get all my kit, including the bike, out of the car. I would have preferred to do this myself and left him queuing, but the officials need to check your face against your BTF race licence photo, so I have to stay. 5 minutes later, Dad and Mum appear with my kit and my bike. No helmet. Where’s my helmet? Dad realises he’s left it on the roof of the car. Off he goes back to get it. I double check to make sure my Dad has reattached my front wheel correctly. No, he hasn’t, it’s on the wrong way round! Remove the wheel, reattach it. Yay, I’m at the front of the queue. Ellie Dominey. What’dya mean, I’m not on the list? I was on the start wave list sent out via email? I took a fairly late entry off Vikki Thompson, but the change was processed in time. Can you check again please? Phew, they have found me.

Ok, now to attach these stickers to my helmet and bike, attach my emergency tool kit to the saddle, and attach the race number to the number belt. Gaaaah, can’t make a hole in the number. Too fiddley. For God’s sakes. Mother, bless her, steps in, and sets to work on making holes. I realise that as it’s now 7:50am and there’s only 10 minutes to go, my time is better served getting into my wetsuit. Have I gained weight? It feels tighter. Why is it so tight? As for a warm up, ha!, no time. Will warm up as I go. A risky strategy as, with my calves, I like to warm up and stretch first before getting into the cold water. Realise I need the loo – haven’t been since I left home. Now have wetsuit on and queue for loos is about 12-15 deep. Sod it. Eeeeeeew. Yes, I did. Before even getting in the water. Figure it will flush through during the swim and I’ll be clean on exit. Never said tri was pretty.

Beach start at Blackpool Sands. Sea looks calm but had a large off-shore swell.

I am the one near the back, probably!

Walk down to the beach, 2 minutes to get in, splash your face, acclimatise, then back onto the beach for the mass beach start. Water feels very cold – was hoping it would have warmed up more by now. The sea looked calm enough from the shore, but once we got out there was a very large swell. It didn’t take me long before I actually started to feel a bit sick with all the ups and downs! Ridiculous. Didn’t realise I’d need to take Sealegs or Stugeron before competing! There were 2 waves – wave 1 for swimmers with a 750m time of 15 minutes or faster, wave 2 for 15 mins +. At the Cotswold tri last year, I did exactly 15 minutes, so I opted for wave 1, thinking I’d rather draft quicker swimmers than lead out and pathfind for the slower ones. I did realise though, that this would put me as one of the last to emerge from the water and warned my parents not to be alarmed if they were waiting longer than they might think reasonable for me! Still, I had a shocker of a swim even by my already poor standards. I tried to draft a guy early on and get on his hip, but he was going too fast, I couldn’t hang onto him. At the first turn, I realised I wasn’t last, but definitely in the last 9/10^ths! You know you’re going really bad when a guy pulls up alongside you doing breaststroke! Nope, for me, triathlon swims are definitely to be endured, not enjoyed. 2 massive gob-fulls of the English Channel and 19 whole minutes later, I finally emerge from the sea, like some bedraggled, washed up porpoise, and start running up the beach to make up some lost ground. ‘You’re 18^th woman’, my Dad shouts at me, ‘What happened? We thought you must have drowned’.  Luckily for him, I was too out of breath to produce an equally sarcastic retort.

The long, tiring run up the shingle beach to T1.

Get off, you swine.

T1. Not great. Never is. There is an art to wetsuit removal, and I have most certainly not mastered it. But, T1 time 1:51, sub 2 minutes is getting better. Off on the bike, the first mile is up a 16% hill. Chance to warm up and start making my way through the field. Climbing, I am in my element, picking off lots of riders. The descent down the otherside was a little bit dicey due to recent rain making the surface slippery. Three people would come off by the end of the morning, one being a more serious ambulance job, so I did my usual cautious thing of feathering the brakes the whole way down. Onto Slapton sands and there is a headwind, chance to get on the tri bars, start upping the power and working my way up the placings. I lose track of how many women I’ve overtaken, but, at the turnaround of the out-and-back course, I see about 6 or 7 women coming back the other way in front of me. I get a couple more of them on the return leg and pull into T2 in 5^th position in the ladies race after a 45 minute bike split – this was to be the 3^rd fastest female bike split of the day.

Cresting the top of the first hill.

And coming back down it at the very end: 3 people came off on this corner, it was steep, sharp and slippery - all the 'sssssss'!!

The organisers changed the run route on race morning. Concerned with crossing over the main road as they did last year to head up the valley, they decide to create an intricate and convolute 4 lap route around the event car park. It involved hurdling a wooden fence twice on every lap, and running up a steep, sandy and slippery sea defence wall four times too. It was rutted underfoot and very twisty and didn’t allow me to utilise my best discipline to its full effect as you just couldn’t establish a rhythm. That said, it was the same for everybody, and I did manage the fastest female run split, so I guess we all found the going hard. 22 minutes for a short 5k is far from fast, but it was decent enough given the course and allowed me to claw my way up to a podium position by the finish, coming in as 3^rd lady overall and 2^nd in my age category. I wouldn’t have expected this halfway through the swim, I would just have been happy to finish without regurgitating all the sea water I swallowed. There is a danger here I could focus on the negatives again - yes, I had a shit swim, but I loved the bike route and made the best I could of the run, given the course wasn't all that runable! I did ok.

The strange 5k run route around the Blackpool Sands beach car park!

Lots of snaking about around fencing - rather confusing!

More stress then came as I headed back to transition to collect my things to find my wetsuit missing. As boxes have been banned in transition by the BTF this year, it tends to lead to belongings getting strewn everywhere, run over by bikes, kicked along by runners, generally trampled into the grit and dirt. I’m not a fan of this new rule. My wetsuit, being the basic entry level Foor Classic, is owned by many and so I guess someone picked it up thinking it was theirs. Much panic about how I could source a new wetsuit in time for heading up to the Dambuster in 5 day’s time and the person realised their error and brought it back. Stress not quite finished yet. I go to print a final print out of my finish position to check I am still in 3^rd before the prize giving and it says I am now 27^th woman! What?! How can I be 3^rd in the faster wave, yet 24 women from the slower second wave have beaten me? I ask the organisers to check, he casually tells me, ‘Oh yes, you were disqualified.’ SAY WHAT? ‘Scuse me? For what? ‘You only did 3 laps instead of 4 on the run.’ ‘No I flippin’ didn’t! I remember every one of those ghastly, convoluted things distinctly, plus both my parents were counting them for me. I can even show you my Garmin data’. After showing that my watch revealed I’d run 3 miles in 22 minutes, he double-checked the computer and realised that he’d accidentally copied-and-pasted two x lap 1, forgetting lap 2, so the computer thought I hadn’t run that one and automatically DQ’ed me! Minor heart-attack but he did manually amend it so I was called forward for my prize. Matt always tells me I am too cynical, but there’s a reason my motto is ‘TRUST NO-ONE’!!

Thanks must go to Vikki for the half-price entry, which I then won back in cash and prosecco: good prizes at this event. Vikki, being the amazing all-round athlete that she is, would have easily contended for top honours had she been on the start line.

Cash and prosecco - prize heaven!

The event has left me wondering where I go from here as far as multi-sport is concerned. Last night, we had a CSS timed swim at tri club. The last one I did, back in October, I swam 7:04 for the 400m. Last night I did 7:24. I know I was tired, but still, to get slower over the winter, after diligently training with the club twice a week, in addition to swimming at last once a week on my own on top of this, is bloody frustrating to say the least. I am acutely aware that I am no water baby. I figure I have probably improved all I am going to on the swim, but, at the top level of competition, this just isn’t good enough to keep me in contention. I lost 6 minutes to the first lady out of the water at South Hams; our bike times were pretty equal, and I made up 4 minutes on the run. I simply cannot claw back what I lose. I can regain some time, enough to scrape me into 3^rd spot – which is what keeps happening – but without a better swim, I will never be able to access those top two berths against a strong field. With duathlons, I replace my weakest discipline (swim) with two cracks at my best discipline (run)…. I think if I am to compete at a high level, it will have to be in dus and not tris.

We’ll see what next Saturday brings. The Dambuster will be my first crack at the Olympic distance event with a 1500m lake swim (yes! Love a lake, no waves, so salt!), 42km hilly bike and 10k run. Having decided that even if I qualify for the worlds at this event, I won’t be taking up the place, the pressure is now lifted and I can go to Rutland Water next week and aim to enjoy the experience of competing against a top class field and seeing how I fair.