London Tri 2/3 of a 'Race' Report

Given how little racing i've done i can't really avoid writing this one up...even if it wasn't the best of results...

We arrived at the race on the saturday as my lil' bro Taco and the other Bodyworks XTC amigos were racing in the youth race. It was really good to see the guys race, their thoughtful and aggressive approach to racing definitely made me buck up my ideas for the following day! However traipsing around Excel (the mahhosive building where the triathlon is based) meant that my legs were tired and flat by the afternoon...schoolboy error!

Come race day I was feeling really really really stupidly legs-shaking running to toilet nervous, i shouldn't have been feeling like this given that there was zero expectation/pressure (I had only been running for a couple of weeks after having 8 weeks off with shin splints since vancouver), however i was and it was leaving me feeling drained and pretty negative.

The race start was an absolute fiasco, there is not way you can get 60 highly competitive athletes to line up perfectly for a deep water start...you just can't!! Not to mention a false start where we swam well over 100m before the kayaks ploughed into our path in a dangerous stopping manouvere. Once we finally got going I started to feel a bit better but I was definitely lacking the sharpness to be able to move up in the final 400m to secure a good position coming into T1. T1 felt like i had slipped into slow motion, missing the front pack by a matter of 5 seconds. These 5 secs were to prove very costly and an emotional 7km of painful riding ensued as I desperately tried to hook back onto a seriously shifting front pack, eventually I got back on with a couple of other guys however the pace continued to be fast, which never allowed me to settle or feel comfortable...despite this I was the 1st in and accelerated out of the last dead turn and found myself with a cheeky gap that only a few guys bridged up to before T2 (if nothing else I grabbed some crafty TV time).

The less the said about the run the better, it was always going to be tough to blag a 10km off so little training and the hard bike put pay to even scraping a decent 5km before popping. So I was straight on to survival mode and ploughed around the run feeling slow and miserable. The good news is is that there was no shin pain and hopefully i will be able to resume the hard runs that should get me back in the mix within a month or so...