Knockburn triathlon

Once again I am a week late on a race review. And once again that is because there isn't much worth talking about.

Pre-race was good. I managed to get there and get set up. I coped with the crowds and the race briefing much better.

The swim was a bit rougher than last year. One gent in a red hat and a 2XU suit needs to work on his sighting though as he was weaving around in front and alongside me several times including dishing me out a couple of punches and a kick in the face. Was quite pleasing that he eventually wandered of towards the middle of the loch on the home straight, and last I saw of him was the kayak marshall poking him with a paddle. I was out of the water a minute down on last year. Even now that the full results are out I can't figure out if that was a decent swim or not. A lot of people were 2-3minutes slower than previous years and some much stronger swimmers were still in transition as I arrived, but similarly some swimmers were 2 minutes faster than they went last year, and I was still about half way down the field, but the field was much smaller, and it looks to have been a higher average quality, but then I should have improved enough to be faster, ....

And that was pretty much the last point at which I have any doubt about whether it was a good day or not. The bike was a struggle right from the off and it was pretty much just a case of counting people as they went past and trying to decide how long I could put up with the painfully numb toes before I would have to give it up. Annoyingly with about 2 miles to go I started gaining on someone I knew, who had passed me on the second lap but never really opened a big enough gap. That gave me enough incentive to keep pedalling and even to go out on the run. I had decided not to run somewhere on lap 2 but changed my mind as I caught him coming up the final climb. In hindsight that was not a good change.

The first half mile of the run I can comfortably claim was a jog. It took all of that and more to thaw out my toes, and I thought this would then allow me to make some inroads into a large group that were just ahead of me while staying ahead of the few dispersed individuals behind me. Those thoughts lasted about another 200 yards. I was just settling in to a comfortable jog and gaining on the group and then I was walking. Not by an conscious decision, not because of any pain or injury, not for any reason I have yet been able to fathom. Some part of me decided it had had enough, and no amount of arguing with myself, of reminding myself that I was easily fit enough, of looking over my shoulder to remind myself there were still people to beat, or any of the other things I tried for the remaining 5 miles made any sort of difference. In a very similar jog a few steps / walk the next 50 style that I had for sections of my marathon I still managed to keep moving forward and get round the course. Setting in the process my slowest ever 10k(not even allowing for the shortness of the course). 58 minutes, 12 minutes slower than last year, 8 slower than I jogged round the same route as a warm-up last July.

From there it was a challenge to pack my things and go home without giving in to the panic attack that was nibbling at the edges of me. I know some people spoke to me after the race but I can't for the life of me remember who they were, or what was said. I am fairly confident that it wouldn't have been pleasant.

It was too early in the season, and too early for me especially, to do a standard distance race so close to home. I am physically fit enough, but not mentally ready, and not race fit. So my solution is to go to the opposite extreme and do a super-sprint, 80 miles away next weekend. I went through today to check out the course with a few others. It is not very mountainous for a mountain bike route and the run is about as flat as I could hope for after last week.