Lisboa Triathlon

My first triathlon of 2013 was at the end of my training camp with my tri-team ‘TriTrainingHarder’. I had really been looking forward to the race but was not sure how my legs would stand up given that I had run the London Marathon 13 days earlier and had been training consistently for the past ten days.

Chantal Cummings, one of the coaches with TriTrainingHarder, had ensured that I at least had a small taper leading up to the race (I did not play squash on the Thursday afternoon!!!). I travelled to Lisbon from the Algarve with Jenny and Karen who are also on the team this year, along with our driver, coach and photographer Tim Butt.

Because of a long-race the following week I was racing in the ‘Olympic-Plus’ triathlon along with Jenny, who would start with all of the women 12 minutes ahead of the men, in a ‘battle of the sexes, winner takes all’ race format. The 1,900 metre swim, 45 kilometre cycle and 10.5 kilometre run was centred around the marina.

Jenny was smashing the other women apart in the swim and was nearly out of the water as we started. Wearing my new HUUB wetsuit I felt good throughout the swim, although I failed with my tactic of drafting throughout, ending up leading a small second pack throughout.

I was in around tenth place after the swim but 10km into the 45km cycle I was up into 5th, with 4 of us fighting it out across 4 lanes of motorway to ensure we did not get caught for drafting, which would result in a 5 minute penalty. At one point all four of us were spread out alongside each other, each in a different lane. By lap two I could see that Jenny had built a considerable lead on all of the other women and we were around 6 minutes down. I decided to smash out the last 10km of the bike and heading onto the run I thought I was leading male. I had no idea that 5 minutes ahead of me was a Portuguese guy who had competed at London 2012!

The run was a standard afair- gradually building a lead over the guys behind me and chasing Jenny down. I got to within a minute of her by the end but it was slightly too much and she was running really well! Still, 3rd place overall and 2nd male is a good start to 2013’s triathlons and I can’t wait to get going again!!

TriTrainingHarder did amazingly well that weekend with Canada Karen and Coach Philip winning their respective age-groups in the Half Ironman and Coach Chantal being in 2nd place after the cycle (she pre-planned to stop in T2). Well done team!!