Irontwit

The provisional results sheet for the Dambuster has been released and my official time is 2:42:29, or 1 second slower than my PB. I think I finished 123rd in my age group and 332nd out of 561 starters. I can’t analyse my performance compared to my age group as the results are in a text pdf format. Why do organisers do that? A simple spreadsheet would be so much better.

If I compare my times with my best Olympic race which was Salford then it’s quite clear where the difference is. In Salford I did the swim in 32:40 compared to 36:45 at the Dambuster, and although my run at the Dambuster was 4 minutes faster, it wasn’t quite fast enough. That swim time however, is suspiciously fast (by my abysmal swim time standards) as I’ve never got close to it in any other Olympic race (or training for that matter) so I conclude that the course at Salford on that day was shorter than the 1500m standard. Although, having said that, the fastest swim time for that race was bang on 20 minutes, and yesterday, several people went under 20 minutes for the swim. Maybe that day, being my first ever Olympic distance I was extra-hyped and really did put in a Phelps like swim!

The real reason I missed my PB was down to transition. I was wearing my new road shoes which I intend to use for the Ironman as they are so comfortable. Trouble is, the boa lacing system is a bit fiddly for rapid shoe change, so I lost a few seconds putting them on and taking them off. I also hadn’t fitted elastic laces to my trainers. Again, in the Ironman I want to be able to adjust the laces easily so I had to tie two bows, again, probably at least 30 seconds lost. I reckon that added up to at least a minute lost in transition – small beer in Ironman terms, but enough for me to miss out on my PB.

If I managed to hook up my perfect race with the swim from Salford 2003, the bike leg from Bala 2004 and the run from yesterday’s Dambuster, my finish time would be 2:30:44 or an improvement of 158 places! Maybe that 2:30 triathlon isn’t an impossibility after all.