Warwick Tri - Swim

It was the  . . . uh . . . usual race day wake up for me.

How cool is that?

I’v now got the experience to have ‘usual’ wake-ups. I don’t mean that they’re like the mornings where the alarm clock goes off and it’s time to get up for work / training / get Daughter up & off to school. I still wake up three minutes before the alarm goes off and bounce right out of bed. And the night’s still been peppered with the strangest of dreams about arriving late / messed up transitions / and stuff like that.

But as a race day . . . this was just run-of-the-mill usual. Bouncing out of bed, my heart beating like a f****ed clock (it’s a quote from Withnail and I - don’t blame me for the language), running to the bathroom to get myself a shave to make an advertising copywriter proud . . . and the first of many visits to the toilet. That’s probably way too much detail. But you get the idea.

There were some logistics to handle too - Tall Friend’s Wife was also taking part in the race - the super-sprint version, which is 200m swim / 10k bike and 2.5k run (not bad for a woman who got her belly sliced open in February). Her start time was 08:45, mine was 09:51, and Tall Friend at 10:05. We had bikes and transition boxes and a fed and happy baby to get over there . . . and keep amused while we all acted like eejits on a Sunday morning.

Tall Friend and Mrs Tall Friend drove the car around, with their bikes, the baby and all the boxes in it, while I cycled across the park. Right through a beer bottle that the scroats had smashed there last night. Unbelievably, no puncture and no glass in the tyre. Someone up there’s looking after me, or just saving it for the race!

I looked after Baby at the bike out from transition, while Tall Friend cheered from the poolside. I got a grandstand view of Mrs Tall Friend’s T1, and was able to shout advice - “Sit DOWN to put your shoes on!”; “Helmet wrong way ’round!”; “Nooo! - Off the bike!”. She was actually doing really well - but sometimes you need  an external eye to point out the obvious!

Anyway, I got my bike and transition set up while Tall Friend held Baby . . . and then Mrs Tall Friend was through T2 and then at the end of the run . . .

And then before I’d had time to think, I was in the pool.

A note about pool-based races here. You generally swim the distance in the same lane, and depending on the intervals of the starts, you end up with several swimmers in the same lane. My only criticism of this race would be that their intervals between starting waves was too short - at one point there were four (FOUR - count ‘em - 1, 2, 3, 4) people in my lane.

I mention this because I ended up behind one slow swimmer for the first 100m, and unable to overtake them because of the oncoming traffic until they got out of the pool . . . and then behind another for the next 150m. In the end I got the second one to let me pass at a turn by batting her feet for about a length and a half with my hands. I’m not sure if this is entirely ethical / sportsmanlike / whatever - your views appreciated.

Anyway, the upshot of this was a merely acceptable swim time - just over nine minutes. Time to leg it to T1 & see if I could make up some time on the bike . . . .

Workout:

• Type: Swim
• Date: 09/09/2007
• Time: 09:51:00
• Total Time: 00:09:12.00
• Distance: 400 m
• Average Pace: 2:18.08/100m

Filed under: Friends, Swim, Triathlon