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.