Finally it’s the end of season, it may be a week earlier than normal, but coming into my last European cup I was feeling tired, and a poor race in Romania confirmed that I was done, so I hung on for a nice local race at Clacton where I managed to take the win, and now I’m currently enjoying a week of doing nothing triathlon related…

Now for a quick recap of my last couple of races

My first European cup was in Karlovy Vary, and what a race.  A beautiful town, a testing, technical and difficult course meant an honest race and I was pleased to take 24^th in my first ever European cup, as my main aim at the start of the season was to use these as a learning experience to take into next season. And here are the main things I learned

·       A 20% hill is not nice to go up once let alone 7 times…

·       A massive flight of steps on the run do nothing to help your legs

·       A pontoon that is about a meter above the water leads itself to a diving competition at the end of each swim lap (it felt like there should have been a panel of judges marking them…)

·       I still need to work on swim take out speed to not get flattened at the start

·       I can hang on the bike with some of the best riders on the circuit

Swim start - it was a long way down

The Hill...

Taking these lessons into my second race in Romania, I was hoping for a great race, and after a flying out on the Friday, course reccie and briefing on the Saturday it was a long day of sitting around on the Sunday morning ready to go, and from the moment I set of, I felt flat. The swim was crazy rough, considering it was meant to be a lake, and I just didn’t have any go, so onto the bike I worked hard on the first couple of laps to bike up to the chase group, caught at the dead turn, and then immediately got dropped, so then it was a long way round, occasionally working with the odd athlete, but mostly on my own, and then the run was a case of survival. If I counted the number of times I thought to myself shall I stop then I’m sure it would have been in the hundreds, but I stuck it out, and collapsed over the finish line. Not quite the race I was looking for, but now to asses why this happened – whether it’s the heat that doesn’t agree with me or just end of season tiredness, but hey I finished, and beat the 20 odd people who DNF.

That was painful...

Relieved to finish

So it’s onto a block of solid winter training now, and hopefully back stronger next season.