Stourhead Sprint: Survive the swim, savour the bike, smash the run!

Triathlon season is underway! Last weekend I competed in the Immortal Sprint at Stourhead. With a 900m swim, 19 mile bike and 4.75 mile run, it’s actually midway between sprint and standard distance, so a 'mega sprint'. I was attracted to this race by a few things: the shorter swim to bike/run ratio; the stunning location within the grounds of the Stourhead Estate (part of the National Trust, so bonus points for free staff parking, 20% discount in the café and free entry for my supporters, all part of the N.T. staff perk package!); the 5pm start time. 5pm is an unusual time for a triathlon – they tend to be crack of dawn affairs – but the Immortal Sprint was part of a weekend of racing within the estate, with a 10k race Saturday morning, the sprint Saturday evening and a half iron distance at 7am Sunday morning. Was an evening race more enjoyable?…. I’ll cover that one in a bit!

Being 2 weeks after the duathlon champs in Soria, I thought that this was sufficient time to rest and recover and feel raring to go again. However, me being me, our 4 days in Madrid were spent entirely on our feet, walking here, there and everywhere, and that was tiring in itself. The day after we returned from Spain I ran the Ivybridge 10k. When I signed up for it I thought I would be in good 10k shape, but all the set backs of 2017, including the achillies niggle at the start of the year, then the 8 week long cough/cold/chest infection and then a calf strain at Clumber Park all meant that I just wasn’t able to do the training and the miles needed to get myself up to speed. I decided to run Ivybridge anyway and was pleased with a time of 40:16 on what is by no means a flat course and to just clinch third place in a sprint finish…. I don’t do speed work and my legs are just not used to sprinting, so this turn of speed came as a shock to me! 4 days after Ivybridge I took part in my first ever cycling time trial, a 10 miler on the Sid Valley course that goes on the A30 through Honiton and back. I clocked a time of 26:45, which, I am reliably told, is not a bad first attempt… for a woman…. on a road bike… with no power meter or HRM or any means of pacing herself other than via her usual ‘go like fuck and hang the hell on’ approach: it hasn’t let me down yet! Anyway, Stourhead then came 3 days after the T.T., so, in hindsight, I once again took on a bit too much in a short space of time and didn’t feel exactly fresh and raring to go come race day.

A pre-race stroll around the gardens and grounds.

 The 5pm start…. Hmm…. On the face of it, attractive: no setting the alarm for ghastly o’clock and relying on intravenous caffeine to get you going. However, I never seem to perform well at evening races and every evening race I have done I have struggled to get my nutrition and eating pattern right throughout the day and this often leads to me getting a mid-race stitch at some stage. It happened at Ivybridge (a 6pm start) where I struggled with a bad stitch for the best part of a mile, and it happened again here. I am someone who suffers with severe blood sugar crashes and needs to eat little and often throughout the day and I think, with evening races, I end up eating too much through fear of having a blood sugar bonk mid-race. Evening races also mean you have a whole day to stress and get worked up rather than just a couple of hours. We went up to Stourhead early to make the most of the long drive there, make a day of it and look around, but then I start thinking, ‘I’m spending too long on my feet, I’ll pay for this later, maybe I should just go and sit in the café and eat some more….’ By the time 5pm came, I was devoid of adrenaline as I’d used it all up in the hours preceding the race, but full of food and stress hormones having spent hours working myself up. On reflection, I think I prefer morning races!

On the lake shore, ready to go: let's get this aquatic ordeal over with!

Charge to the first buoy, which was very close to the bank and very congested!

 The lake at Stourhead is sizeable, but not massive, and to fit a 900m loop into it, they have to take you almost out to its perimeter. At one point you swim through a narrow channel between the main bank and a lake island. Although it looked lovely and clear from the bank before we entered, it didn’t take long for 200+ triathletes to churn it up and, because we swam so close to the shore, most of the swim was in very shallow water (at one point I put my hand down to take a stroke and scraped the rocks on the bottom). The result was the most awful swim experience I’ve had yet! There were no staggered wave starts, all 200 ish competitors set off at once, and the turn at the first buoy was fast, frenzied, and gnarly. I got dunked, swum over, elbowed and kicked, and swallowed what felt like half the lake, and this was only 100m in! My breathing rate went up, I couldn’t establish a rhythm as there was just no space, the water was so silted up it was black as the night… can you tell I hated every minute of it!? It was extremely disorientating to plunge your face into pitch black water, then turn to breathe in full sunlight and keep repeating this process every breath. I felt…. get ready for one of my favourite words…. discombobulated! “Never again. Stick to duathlons. You hate swimming and you are shit at it. This is not for you.” 

For me, the swim usually pans out something like this:

Feel competitive and fired up, so position myself at the front on the start line.

Look over my shoulder, see how many competent-looking swimmers are behind me, start shuffling back a couple of rows.

Claxon goes, we start swimming, I swiftly start getting over-taken.

Realise I was wildly overambitious and should have positioned myself 6 people back, not 3.

Have a truly horrendous experience at the first buoy due to my over-zealous positioning.

Emerge the far side of the first turn, looking like a drowning tortoise that’s found itself cast adrift on a giant pond and is then being attacked by a pack of vicious but graceful porpoises.

Why are you doing this? You are tortoise, not porpoise. The water is not the place for you.

Regroup. Remind myself that although I’m the tortoise of the water I am the gazelle of the dry land: my time is coming; I just need to get through this ordeal first.

Finally the pack starts to thin and I can actually start swimming (as opposed to the drowning avoidance type of survival moves I have been employing up until now).

Start to pick off a few swimmers who went out too hard early on. Swim exit sighted. Feeling good.

Haul myself out of the water and back into my natural environment.

Meh. Survived. Suppose the swim wasn’t so bad. Now let’s get to work.

Swim survived: now we get to work.

 At Stourhead though, the pack did not thin out and I never got to the point of finding a nice rhythm and picking people off. That swim exit could not come soon enough! Once back on terra firma, that is where the race really begins for me. Time to start making up all the places I have just lost. Let’s go!

It was a long run up a fairly steep drive to T1 (T1 time of over 5 minutes for most competitors give an indication of how far away the racks were from the lake). I think this played to my advantage as I overtook 3 women on the run up to T1 alone! Out on the bike, wanting to put my bad swim behind me and put the hammer down but my slow swimming once again came back to bite me. The problem with being so far down out of the water is that there are so many people in front of you who are far less athletic and less fit than you on dry land, who you now need to overtake. The first part of the bike route was on windy, narrow lanes through a couple of villages and I found that the cars that overtook me would then get stuck behind groups of slower riders in front, who I was now catching. For about 2 miles I was stuck in a tail back of cyclists intermingled with vehicles and I couldn’t overtake and get going. Absolutely maddening but nothing to be done – you can’t overtake cars on blind bends and put yourself in the path of oncoming vehicles – just got to sit it out. I tried to focus on the positive and the draft effect and easy ride I was getting from being behind a car and, once the road was clear, I cycled my wee legs off to make up lost ground.

It was a rather hilly route (1400ft elevation over 19 miles), which suited me well and I posted a bike split of just under the hour, averaging 19mph. Lively is living up to her name and consistently delivering me faster bike splits – my white speedy dream machine! Survived the swim and savoured the bike; now to smash the run!

Arriving back into T2 and my Dad told me ‘You’re 6^th female”. I asked, “How far ahead are they?” “5 and 4 not too far, but the others quite a long way”. Hmm…. at 4.75 miles, this was longer than the usual 5k distance of a sprint tri, but would it be long enough to allow me to reel them in? Just gotta go for it and find out.

Off to smash the run!

I caught one lady about a mile in. Ok, 5^th, keep working. The first 3 miles were a slow, steady uphill drag, then we turned back into the estate and began a steep, one mile long descent. I told myself, you can’t be your usual cautious self on the downhill, just go for it. So I let the brakes off and let gravity do the work for me. Approaching the 4 mile point and I hadn’t passed and couldn’t see any other women. We were heading back uphill again and I was flagging and thought about backing off a bit as I wouldn’t have space to catch them now….. and then Matt appeared! He has a habit of being in the right places on a course when I either need a mental pick me up or else some information. I screamed, ‘Where are they all? I’m just not catching any women!’ He said, ‘Third is only 40 seconds ahead and fading fast. You can get her. Push on, go on, push on’. Third? I thought I was fifth. Maybe I had overtaken another lady and mistook them for a man. Maybe my Dad miscounted. With renewed vigour, I kicked on and around the corner I saw her. The last 800m were all uphill and the lady looked like she was struggling. ‘Go past her and go past hard and make it look easy so she doesn’t think about trying to go with you’. She clearly had nothing left to do that and I rounded the corner into the finish funnel to hear my name being announced as third lady. Yes, my Dad had miscounted…. that’s the last time I listen to on-course info from him!

Podium! Might have caught second place too if I'd been able to see her - the invisible triathlete!

Incidentally, the lady I just beat to the podium is a vet 50-59 year old. I have raced her twice previously, at the Cotswold Sprint (my first open water tri) in 2015, and at South Hams Sprint in 2016. Both times, she beat me. She is a phenomenal swimmer and a terrific biker but her run is the only weak spot. So, whilst I take some encouragement from beating her for the first time, I also remind myself that she is approximately 20 years my senior and a truly classy triathlete. I was 13th lady after the swim, 5th (not 6th!) after the bike and 3rd by the finish. I posted the fastest female run split by over 3 minutes, but I lost around 4 minutes on the top ladies on the swim. The usual story. Us top 3 women all finished in consecutive places within a minute of each other.... just needed another mile on the run distance and reckon I could have had a sniff at the top spot. But this is triathlon, not uno-athlon, and there is always a crappy swim to offset.

A couple of days later, back at work, when I informed N.T. Ranger colleagues that I’d swum in Stourhead lake and it was a truly ghastly experience, they comforted me with their talk of weils disease and cryptosporidium. I laughed with them, but then, when 5 days later I was struck down with the more horrendous D and V bug I’ve experienced since having the norro virus in 2012, I’m not so sure! Maybe I had every reason to dislike that swim after all! Who knows? But I think a little break from triathlon is needed for a while before I can face another swim survival experience! Lucky for me that a week’s cruise around the Adriatic for my Mum’s 70^th birthday will provide that break. 

My Spanish silver lining...

I've been back from Spain for nearly a week now and it’s almost two weeks since the ETU European Sprint Duathlon Championships in Soria, so time for some reflections. There is just so much I could write about the whole experience as, frankly, it was an absolutely amazing week, so keeping it brief is going to be hard. I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I am never short of words and brevity isn’t my strong suit, but I’ll try!

The one thing I didn’t think would be a key discussion item regarding a race in Spain was bad weather… I've had my fair share of bad weather at races in the UK (Slateman topping the pile!). But, Soria sits high in the mountains, at 1100m – yes, that it higher than Snowdon – and so it has its own quirky weather system. Cold cold winters and hot hot summers are typical, but in the interim seasons, i.e., back end of April, you can get any and all of the weathers within this annual spectrum within the space of a few days. 10 days before the championships, temperatures were 22 degrees: that would represent ideal racing conditions for me as I cope relatively better in heat than in cold. 5 days before the champs, temps were down to zero degrees and the town saw snowfall.  Not ideal; in fact, bloody awful. The 7-day forecast ranged from 2 degrees up to 20 for the time we would be there. So, into the suitcase went my winter jumpers, hats, gloves, scarves, along with my shorts, tee-shirts, vest tops. Packing for the race meant the trisuit, along with two base-layers, a water-proof cycling jacket and 3 different types of glove.

After a flight from Heathrow to Madrid with Iberia, we boarded an Alsa coach for the 2 ½ hour drive to Soria. What struck me on the journey was that we seemed to spend the entire time going up. Madrid already sits high above sea level on a plateau, and yet we continued to climb. Stepping off the coach, the drop in temperature from Madrid to Soria was striking – about 4 degrees the evening we arrived, with a wind chill factor far below that.

Matt had planned the whole trip expertly, as usual, to save me the stress of such issues and allow me to concentrate on my race. We’d got a hotel which was literally a 30 second walk from the race start and finish line and only cost 50 euros a night. That was the second thing that struck me about Soria – how ridiculously cheap everything was in the town. It’s not a tourist location; in fact, one American lady who’d married a Spaniard and been living in the town for the past 10 years remarked that this was the first time she’d heard English voices there in all that time! None of the locals spoke English and so my rusty Spanish (mostly just an adaptation of the French word with a Spanish accent and hoping for the best) had to be coerced out of hibernation. The feel of the town was extremely welcoming, friendly and relaxed and this all added to the experience. There was an amazing bakery and café, called ‘York’, again just 30 seconds walk from our hotel, which sold the best array of cakes I have ever clamped eyes on. Lunch on our first day was in a little café bar. We had two filled crusty rolls each, I had two coffees and Matt had tea, all for 7 euros! An evening meal with wine for two came in at around 15 – 20 euros. It was a real shock after our last trip abroad to Paris last November where you couldn’t get a coffee with much change from 5 euros.

We arrived on Thursday and my race was on Sunday. Friday I was repatriated with my bike, expertly hand-delivered to my hotel room in Soria by Cycle Transfer, who had collected it from my house the previous weekend and driven it down to Spain. (Lively was subsequently driven back to the UK after and was there waiting for me at home when I got back). I then cycled up to the Team GB Hotel, which we were too late to get a room in when we booked, but, on reflection, was a blessing as it was 20 minutes out of the town and away from all the action and race venue. The Team GB mechanic checked my bike over and gave her a small service and I had a massage from the GB masseuse to get my legs race ready. That afternoon Matt and I did a 5 mile easy trail run on the gravelly trails on the edge of town. Two things alarmed: one, Soria is bloody hilly, and two: the thinner air at this altitude made breathing noticeably harder, particularly on that first run as I was acclimatising. Another competitor looked into this after the race and produced some stats: at 1100m there is only 89% of the available oxygen at sea level. For someone who runs a 5k in 20 mins at sea level, this would roughly equate to 20:30 – 20:45 mins at this altitude. (I did not know this when I posted a run time of over 20 mins, but finding it out after, and finding out that no women broke 19 minutes, def helps explain the slower times across the board).

On Friday afternoon we registered and I got my race number. Athletes could buy a 1 euro pass which allowed us to use any of the sports facilities in the town, including gyms and swimming pools, for the whole week of the championships. Matt was allowed too as “my coach” (well, they weren’t to know!), and so Friday afternoon we went for a swim in a lovely pool and had it to ourselves for most of the session. Friday night was the opening ceremony. All the participating athletes paraded through the town, behind our national flags and flag bearer, to the race start / finish and media area, where the town’s mayor officially welcomed us and opened the championships. Fireworks and party number 1 followed.

The Saturday we mostly spent watching the elite, junior and para duathlon races. I took special note of how the elites mount their bikes and get into their shoes. A few were very slick but most were faffing around trying to get their shoes on once on the bike, having pre-attached them with elastic bands. I have been weighing up to the pros and cons of this method for a while, but, unless you are super-slick and can master it perfectly, I think you lose more time doing this than just putting your cycling shoes on in T1 and running to the mount line in them. This was confirmed on race day when I got to the mount line at the same time as three other girls who were using the elastic band method; I clipped straight in and was away and left them faffing around in my wake: never saw them again!

Saturday afternoon was the Team GB briefing. A chance for all our questions and worries to be answered and alleviated… er, well, mostly. There was some... no... lots of confusion over the layout of transition. The race rule booklet had published one thing, our team managers had been told (and so told us) something different. Come race morning when we went to rack, the layout had changed yet again and was different to both the pre-advertised layout and the revised layout we’d be told of yesterday… and then, the icing on the cake, when we ran into T1 after the first run, we were all horrified to find it had changed yet again, for a forth time, even from what we were told by officials in the transition area just a few hours earlier! I am not saying that this had an impact on me totally overshooting my bike in T1 and running back and forth effing and jeffing for the best part of 20 seconds until I found it, but I’m sure it didn’t help! Then came the pre-race GB group photo call, and then the official business was all done for the day. Off to find a Spanish restaurant that actually opened at 6pm to enable us to have an early dinner (9pm onwards is usual on Spanish time scales), then try to get some sleep…. HA! Fat chance of that. There was the medal ceremony for all the Saturday races, followed by party number two. The Spanish love a reason to fiesta and the townsfolk really got behind the whole championships and embraced every minute of them… on this occasion, every minute right up until 3:30am on the Sunday morning. I was beginning to see a downside to a hotel room just 30 seconds walk from the start / finish area….

The startline / finish / media area.... oh, and that's our hotel in the background!

Back to weather talk. The Friday had been very cold but beautifully sunny. Not bad racing conditions as you could base layer up, but the ground was dry. Some of the sections went over cobbles, rather shiny cobbles, and these are notoriously ice-rink like when wet. Saturday was slightly warmer (8 degrees), overcast and threatening rain, but it never happened. Sunday's forecast was for showers around lunch time with a chance of thunder. Great. The last place I'd opt to be in a thunder storm is out on an exposed Spanish motorway on two skinny wheels. Wake up at 6:15am race morning, having had no more than 3 hours sleep due to the party. Look out of the window: dry, phew. Go and get a shower to wake me up, emerge, get kit ready, check window again: the ground is now soaking wet. There’s been a downpour whilst I’ve been in the sodding shower. Oh no! After days of being dry, this will mean the surface is greasy and lethal slippery. Stress levels start to rise.

Eat porridge. Neck coffee. Get bike and transition kit ready and leave the hotel. Around the corner, the ground is bone dry…. Then I see the Spanish town workers further up the street hosing it down to clean it, just like they do at 6:30am every morning! Doh. Calm down a bit now, the bike route should be dry, horray! But it’s windy, boy is it windy. Rack, then go for a warm up, then back to the hotel to chill for 20 minutes until my call time. That 20 minutes is pretty much spent back and forth to the ensuite bathroom toilet. Suddenly found a fresh appreciation of a hotel room so close to the start: no queuing for revolting portaloos, just use my own facilities then mosey on down a minute before my call time.

We are held in pens and set off at 3 minute intervals. Men aged 16-39 at 8:30am, men 40-49 8:33, men 49+ 8:36, then us women 16-39 at 8:39. In the holding pens behind the start, the Pirates of the Caribbean theme tune is played on the loud speaker, then, to build tension, it turns to a loud beating heart as you get to a minute to go. Then, the horn: GO!

The course layout is not ideal. It’s a narrow path that snakes through the park: 6 hairpin switch backs in total, climbing up one side, turning, coming down the next. It’s two loops, and all the sprint athletes are out on the course at once. Just as we women are about to start, the faster senior men are just coming through at the end of their first lap. Chaos ensues! The men are now trying to weave their way through a wall of women. Up the first side, the wind makes its presence felt and the chunky metal barriers that line the route and keep spectators off the course blow over and onto the run route. Some women in front of me have to hurdle them, one woman trips over and the course is now down to one runner’s width on this section, with approximately 200 runners trying to squeeze through. That first mile is my slowest as I simply cannot find space to get running. By mile two, we are thinning out a bit and I’m starting to catch some of the slower men from the 49+ age group. Matt reckoned that after he first mile, I was around 30^th woman overall. I never start fast as I don’t do any speed work, I just don’t have the leg turnover. But I can pick a pace and stick to it, and often, once my legs warm in, I can up the pace towards the end. So from mile 2 onwards, I start working my way through the field. I’m up to 11^th as I come into T1.

T1 ballsed up, as described above, and I’m in a queue to get out of the field and onto the road to the mountline. Come to a stand still as a result, but nothing to be done. Once on the bike, all the worries about punctures go as all my energy and focus goes into riding. This is the first event I have done on closed roads and it’s great. Mind you, with so many riders out on the course at once, there isn’t a lot of space and we are often 4 abreast overtaking. The draft police are out in force as this is a championship event. I see them issue a couple of penalties (if caught, you must dismount at the end of the lap you’re on and do one minute in the penalty box: game over, basically, if you want to be competitive). The course is mighty hilly. The first half of each lap just sees you climb up and up, before you do a dead turn then hurtle back down the motorway.  I love a good climb and always make gains on uphill sections, but I usually lose it on the downhills, especially if technical like at Slateman, as I am too nervous. This motorway though is ideal: wide, smooth tarmac, a nice gradient, I put the hammer down and manage to hit speeds of 40mph on the descent. Lively feels great and no one overtakes me on the descent, not even the blokes. The wind gusts and is particularly strong as you leave the town and cross a bridge; gusting crosswinds hit you from the right, but I feel in control and ride confidently through it. I later find I have posted the fastest bike split of the day in my age group – not something I would have predicted before the race as I am very much a newbie cyclist and some of the girls in my category have cycling backgrounds and race regularly on the crit and road racing circuit. I think the course just suited me.

Hold on for the second run. I tend to run well off a bike and my average speed for my second run was faster than for my first as my legs have finally got going! On the approach to the finish, the GB Team Managers, Joan and Glyn, are handing out union jacks. I grab a flag and run down the blue carpet to the finish line holding it aloft. What a special moment! I have absolutely no idea how I have done or where I have placed as there were athletes everywhere. Right at that moment, I am happy just to have finished, All this build up, all the time and money expended in just getting here, I was so worried accident, injury or a mechanical would prevent me from completing and make the whole trip a farce. I later find out from the live results streaming that I came 11^th female overall and 2^nd in my age group, so I’ve won a silver medal! I am both elated, shocked, proud and a whole other bunch of emotions rolled into one. Me being me, I’m also panicking: ‘What if I didn’t put my helmet back in my box in T2 and they DQ me?’ Matt tries to reassure me, but until the results are confirmed, I keep thinking it can’t be real and someone’s going to say it’s a mistake, no medal for you.

Later that night, at the medal ceremony, it becomes real. I get to stand on the podium in my GB kit, holding a GB flag, and receive my medal. A magical moment. Then comes party number 3: the biggest yet. Free food, free drink, and then the band start setting up in the square at 10:30pm…. This one goes on until 5am Monday morning, but I don’t care, I’m too excited to sleep anyway. I lay there with my medal on my bedside table next to me, reflecting on the race, and, unusually for me, I don’t think ‘I could have done better, I could have got gold’, I think, ‘Yeh, you done good kidder; girl done good’.

The next morning we travelled to Madrid and spent four nights there unwinding and sight-seeing and, finally, I got the weather I was expecting of sunny Spain: temperatures of 25 – 30 degrees and full sun every day. Post-race refuelling came courtesy of coffee, cava and chocolate covered churros. All the Cs.

Thanks as ever to my chief supporter, organiser, driver, bag carrier and companion on this amazing adventure: my wonderful husband Matt. Without his belief, support and encouragement, I wouldn’t be doing any of this. Thank you.

And well done to my SWRR team mate, Sam Hopton, and my N1 Tri Club team mate, Jake Smith, for their fantastic performances in Soria. Sam smashed the bike and Jake smashed the run and they both had a great time too.

The podium finish pre-qualifies me for next year’s Euro’s (although I had already qualified at Clumber Park in March). It’s now confirmed as Ibiza…. Surely, it’s GOT to be warm and sunny there?!