Thames Turbo Sprint Triathlon 2012.3Very cold wet start to the day, but once we got moving the outlook improved a lot. Immediate thoughts afterwards were that I hadn't made a PB: cold fingers through transition, and it felt windy on the return cycle leg. But it was, by eight seconds.
Swim: 9:00 (-0:04). A little bit more crawl, took about 3-4 other swimmers. This needs practice.
T1: 0:58 (+0:01). Nothing to report, other than I still didn't try the faster shoe position. I think I need single strap tri shoes for that to work.
Bike: 38:42 (-0:01). Cold, wet, windy. The wet isn't good for maintaining speed round the hairpin roundabouts and I got stopped three times at junctions on the way out, plus the red lights at the pumping station - you can see them on the satellite trace. Given all that, I think I'm probably making reasonable progress. One very hairy moment when I locked up three times trying to stop as two buses went round a roundabout across me. Lucky not to come off.
T2: 0:55 (+0:03). Cold fingers.
Run: 20:51 (-0:06). It helped my confidence having people on my shoulder at the start that I pulled away from. A blood stain christens the Racer STs: halfway round the run I was aware of quite a pain around my achilles/soleus, which was worrying but I wasn't going to ease up. At the end I discover the timing chip has eroded a small hole in my ankle that probably contributed to it. Nice.
1:10:26 overall - my Garmin time above includes the time through the non-compete zone.
I wasn't overtaken by anyone until about 400m from the end when two of the fast wave behind us caught me. It's more circumstance than performance, but it felt good!
31st overall, 28th male, 8th in my age group. Got to be happy. Shame there isn't another one until next April…