Mountain biking and first sportive

Double header last weekend, with Forres triathlon on the Saturday and a the Whisky Trail Sportive on the Sunday.

Forres went a lot better than I expected, despite being a grey and showery day. I coped fine with setting up and I even managed a trip to the supermarket on my own in the morning. First time in over a year.

My swim wasn't great. I had hoped to get under 7mins, but finished at 7:24. That is the second race in a row that I have clocked a swim slower than I would have done at the same time last year, but can't really explain why as I am definitely swimming better and faster in training.

This was the first time I have raced on the mountain bike and it went better than expected. It wasn't very mountainous on the whole, so was by far the fastest I have averaged on that bike. Caught up a few places, which was a strange occurrence for me as I normally just count people flooding past on the bike legs. My second transition was terrible. The insoles in my running shoes moved and I had to take both of them off again, and still ended up with a big wrinkle in one of them the second time. Transitions are normally a good section for me so it was annoying to throw away so much time on something so minor.

For the run I should have gone about 4 minutes quicker, but I did at least jog/run all of it this time. At one point I did get up onto the shoulder of third place, but with half a mile to go he pushed on and I couldn't go with him.

Happy to finish 4th Senior though. Much higher than I thought I would be and nearly makes up for finishing as last Senior at Knockburn.


On Sunday morning the weather was even less pleasant, and the idea of biking my first time bike-only race, a 40-mile sportive wasn't really appealling. It was stupid o'clock in the morning though so I managed to get up and moving before my brain got involved and convinced me that it was a poor idea.

Fortunately my two friends turned up and the rain never got worse than showery. We started off with a minor detour but quickly settled onto the right route and into a good pace. Alternating turns at the front and occassional slower, chattier sections. We were still averaging over 16mph for 40miles and 1000ft of climbing in under 2 and a half hours.

40miles seems like a lot, especially having never been past 27 before, but we were moving along nicely so the time and miles went fairly quickly.


So apparently since I didn't react to the posting of my mobile number all over the internet and the resulting string of rude messages, we are back to attempts to hack into my online accounts. So another round of password changes and another page into a folder that is now over an inch thick. I do hope you are enjoying yourselves. And thanks for refreshing my drive to ensure that I get some justice for the last year.