Somewhat late, since I have had pictures on my facebook profile for months, but I thought I should add a post about my experiences at the London Triathlon in August 2008. This was the second of three major endurance events I completed in 2008, the others being the Blenheim Triathlon and the New York Marathon, in aid of Epilepsy Research UK. I would like to thank everyone who generously sponsored me for those events, your donations have since been passed on to the charity and will be put towards improving the quality of life for eplieptics who suffer from more severe symptoms than my own.

The Joy of Weekend Engineering Works

The Mazda London Triathlon was my first Olympic distance event, a 1500m swim, 40km cycle and 10k run. Since I had already had something of a dry run at Blenheim I knew largely what to expect during the race itself. this time however there were no generous family members around to provide transportation, so that was my responsibility, and I don’t drive. Unfortunately, National Express or whoever was running East Anglia’s railways that particular week had picked Sunday 10th August for engineering works between and Cambridge and Audley End. Audley End is a 15 mile cycle from Cambridge, quite a nice cycle on any other day, but one I could have done without on the day I’m supposed to competing in a Triathlon. If that weren’t bad enough, the first train to arrive broke down and I had to wait 45 minutes for the next one. The accumulation of delays reduced the 2 hour buffer with which I had left myself to prepare to about 30 minutes and seriously threatened my participation in the race.

The Swim

Had I not participated this article would have been rather pointless, so suffice to say all problems were resolved and I made it to the ExCel centre and into Prince Albert dock for the beginning of the swim. As at Blenheim I was surprised at the number of triathletes who hadn’t done any open water swimming preparation – I certainly would not have liked that to be my first experience of it. Probably the most depressing part is that the markers for the super sprint and sprint distances were still up, so my initial thought was along the lines of, Oh, its not that far. No wait, that’s for the 400m race, it must be the next one. No, that’s for the 750m race. The marker for the 1500m race was a blurry orange blob in the distance somewhere near Dover. 1500m, a distance I can cover in less than 5 minutes on foot, is a hell of a long way in open water.

The start of a triathlon is a rather chaotic affair, advice is often given for novices to stay near the back and it’s advice I would be inclined to take. The stronger swimmers can make the rest of us minnows feel a bit like a cat in a washing machine during the early stages. Incidentally, it was at this point that I lost my GPS, which now lies at the bottom of Prince Albert dock. Do not be tempted to take yours into the water, leave it for the cycle and the run.

The Cycle

Whoever organizes the Mazda events seems to be intent on making the transitions as painful as possible. In Blenheim there was a 400m uphill run out of the water, in London there is a flight of stairs after the swim, which left me barely able to breathe. Nonetheless, even without the GPS, the cycle is by a huge margin my favourite event and at that time was the only part of the triathlon where I feel I can really compete and not just hold my own. I still had my rather old fashioned road bike but I had finally invested in a set of SPD pedals and, having gone through the baptism of traffic light embarassments, was keen to see what improvement they might make.

There is a certain amount of Schadenfreude to be enjoyed when overtaking someone who clearly spent more on their bicycle than some people do on their cars, with an 8 year old road bike that originally cost less than £200 ( ok, it’s had a few upgrades since then ). Of course, this is just making up for the experience of being overtaken in the water by people twice my age doing breaststroke, so I cannot allow myself to feel too smug about it.

As I said, I didn’t have the GPS so couldn’t be too accurate about pace but I found someone who was just slightly above my standard and followed them around the route ( not too close though, drafting is illegal in most Triathlons, including this one ).

The Run

A word about T2 ( the cycle->run transition ) in the London race. The ExCel centre is huge, as anyone who’s ever been to a conference there will know. Transition to the 10k run involved running around most of the perimeter of the event hall, which, from a rough calculation, is about 400m. That’s just transition, and is not actually part of the run component but it is mitigated somewhat in that the actual run is slightly short of the standard 10km. This was the most difficult part of the race, as the leg muscles adapt to the difference between cycling and running and at one point I didn’t think I was actually going to make it out of the conference centre. It was painful, and involved no small amount of willpower to keep going.

Once that transition period is over though the previous disciplines are forgotten and it becomes all about the run. I am a better 10k runner than I was, but even at that time I was good enough to enjoy it particularly without the blistering heat we had enjoyed at Blenheim in June. The difficult part is that it is a 2 lap race, so there is a psychological impact when you come to the end of the first lap and see the runners ahead of you finishing, knowing that you still have 5,000m to run. At the end of the second lap, there is a punishing uphill ramp to the finishing straight and it was at this final point that I was overtaken by someone who had decided to do a sprint finish and I still regret not taking him on. Next time.

Finish

My final time was 2:56:01, which I think was pretty good for a first effort particularly given a rather poor swim time. A final thanks to fellow triathlete Mark Oxenham who saved me the grief of a train journey home by providing transportation, and to Suzy and Anna for coming down to offer moral support.

Gallery

On November 2nd I ran my first marathon. It remains to be seen if I will run another, but at least I’ll have done New York. It really is the most awesome experience, the weather was just about perfect and the crowds from start to finish were incredible.

I took a package with Sports Tours International so everything was bought and paid for. Not only was this my first marathon but it was also my first trip to NYC ( If I’m going to see the city, I may as well see 26 miles of it… ) so I didn’t want to have to worry about transfers and getting from A to B, but in the end I doubt this would have been much of a problem.

Unfortunately the route information is missing from the map below, but this link should show it accurately. Alternatively, you can download the kml file directly for Google Earth.

View Larger Map

I had been warned some months beforehand that the route was hilly ( well “undulating” would probably be fairer ) and it is, but not that I noticed at the beginning of the race such was the level of enthusiasm. The steepest climb is over the Verrazano-Narrows bridge at the beginning but the shallower, longer climb at the end through Central Park is much tougher, and is magnified by fatigue. Hill training helps but it’s not enough to train when you’re fresh, I think training when tired would be more beneficial and that means longer runs. My own training was interrupted by a calf problem in the last month and by a near disastrous ankle injury the weekend before, but such is the risk you take when you put in the mileage necessary during training.

I was amazed how quickly the first half of the race passed, and I put this largely down to the incredible atmosphere. The new yorkers are incredibly proud of this race, and the route is lined with crowds from start to finish. There are live bands – I high-fived a guitarist on the way round – there’s the inevitable Rocky theme music and at one point a full Gospel choir. You don’t get that on the Cambridge Boundary Run.

The one negative aspect was the size of the race ( about 40,000 competitors ) necessitates large-scale organization, which for us meant getting up for the buses from central Manhattan at 4.00 am and hanging around in the freezing cold until the 10.00 am start. I don’t think this is really necessary, and although I had some fun getting to know some of my fellow runners I would sooner have had the extra few hours sleep and a proper breakfast. So that said, here are some other things I’ll be bearing in mind if I ever do this again.

• The 7.30 am Staten Island ferry is probably sufficient to get to the start on time, but if you must take the 4.00 am buses, take some warm clothing and probably a sleeping bag and a bivvy bag – I kid you not. I raided the charity shops in the week before hand and so kept warm, but even so I looked with envious eyes upon those who were better prepared.
• You’ll need to dump your kit at least an hour before the start, so take some clothes you can dispose of en route, like the aforementioned charity wear. I bought a fleece for £3.50 from a British Heart Foundation shop, which I quickly disposed of after coming off the Verrazano-Narrows bridge and ran the rest of the race in a singlet.
• Bring your own breakfast, since you can’t rely on picking up more than a cup of coffee and a bagel at the start.
• The last few miles are uphill, and are magnified by fatigue so make sure your training takes this into account. There aren’t many hills in Cambridge but even so I could have been better prepared.
• Get your name printed on your running top, I envied the runners getting personal encouragement from the crowd toward the end of the race.
• Try to overcome any weird sense of British modesty and wear your medal everywhere you go for the next day. New Yorkers are incredibly proud of their race, the medal is like a VIP pass.
• Don’t trip over any tree roots the weekend before the race. If you do, Diclofenac is your friend.

All in all I was pleased with my time of 3:57, particularly given the trouble I had with my ankle. Luckily a large tube of diclofenac gel and an ankle support was enough to see me through the race, plus the long straight sections of the race minimized the risk of further injury. I hope I’ll be able to do this race again. No more flying economy class though. It sucks.

The previous incarnation of this site was described by former colleague Rob Morse as being too “geeky”, as most of the content consisted of material for my Open University maths courses. So, to mitigate the inevitable geekification of PlanetMarshall, the first post of the new site will be detailing my efforts at the 2008 Blenheim Triathlon. Just to prove that you do not need to be an obese agoraphobe with a penchant for burgers and comics featuring half naked girls riding dragons to be a computer programmer.

On the 8th of June 2008 I took part in my first Triathlon, consisting of a 750m open water swim, a 20km cycle and a 5k run – a distance that is amusingly known as a “Sprint”.

Preparation

Not being a driver myself, my mother and sister had generously agreed to drive and spend the day at Blenheim Palace, which is about 2-3 hours from Cambridge. The event had clearly been organised with military precision, so I had my timing chip, race numbers and bike racked in the transition area with plenty of time to spare.

The swim

This is, by some margin, my worst event. Thanks though to the Cambridge Triathlon Club I’d manage to get some open water swimming training in the weeks beforehand so I was at least prepared for the challenges that involves. Of course, you have to wear a wetsuit; this is compulsory and since the water was 15°C I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the lake without one. Additionally, under the water you can’t see a damn thing and so you need to practice “sighting”, which essentially means looking where you’re going once in a while to make sure you haven’t gone off at a 90° angle and are swimming into some swans. This happens suprisingly often. One thing that initially worried me was the “washing machine” effect of having about 100 competitive swimmers in the water all starting at the same time, most of which are considerably stronger than me. I found this to be not so much of a problem, as there was plenty of room and no one really goes off at full pelt – I suspect that there were many other first timers there and that they were being equally conservative with their effort.

Even with adequate preparation, the swim was tough. I was unable to complete the full distance in freestyle, which left me doing breast stroke for a short distance in the middle ( backstroke is disallowed for safety reasons, and butterfly would just be stupid ). Incidentally, it’s quite difficult to do breaststroke because the wetsuit is so buoyant that it makes it difficult to push your chest under the water – I was also not helped by the fact that I had now started to digest the Sainsbury’s pasta salad I had had in the car (note to self, eat earlier next time). I have a lot of work to do before the London Triathlon, which is twice the distance, and I would like to do all of it freestyle.

T1

I was glad to get the swim over with, but my initial relief after being helped out of the water by the attendants was mitigated somewhat by the 400m uphill run to the transition area. Of course, I had known about this beforehand but nothing quite prepares you for the actual experience. I kept my mind off it by attempting to dislodge my wetsuit. At this point I was pleasantly surprised to see my mother and sister cheering me on, since I had assumed they would have buggered off round the gardens and left me to it.

I had never done one of these transitions before, but it seemed a fairly straightforward affair of getting the wetsuit off and getting onto the bike. The wetsuit came off quite easily thanks to a tip I had read about putting baby oil on my ankles prior to the swim. Now, if you watch experienced competitors during this period what usually happens is that they have cycling shoes clipped to the pedals prior to starting, which they put on during the initial few seconds of the race while on the bike. My strategy was similar, in that it involved running out of T1 without having put my shoes on. Where it differed was that I did not actually have any cycling shoes, because I had decided to just cycle with conventional pedals in my running shoes, shoes that were at this point back next to my wetsuit ( note to self, get proper pedals and shoes).

The cycle

Having gone back to get my shoes, I was now able to settle in and enjoy the cycle. Cycling is my strongest discipline, and the course at Blenheim has few if any major challenges. There are some undulating sections but nothing that would greatly tax an experienced rider. I would expect most good cyclists to belt round the 20km course in less than 30 minutes. I have no idea what my time was because at about this point I realised that in my hurry to remove the wetsuit the timing chip had come with it. If that weren’t enough, I followed another rider into the transition area on the wrong lap and so had to turn round to resume the race. I contented myself with spending the remainder of the race trying to overtake people on bikes that easily cost at least 10 times what I spent on mine. Two laps later I turned into transition, correctly, picked up my missing timing chip and got settled into the run.

The run

Since running half of the Cambridge Boundary Run in February in a fairly feeble 2:01, running was the discipline that I had probably spent most time training. Still, going straight into a 5k from quite a fast cycle is still a bit of a shock when you do it for the first time. The heat was really a factor at this point and I really began to look forward to the various places on the run at which the attendants were spraying runners with cold water. There are two laps to the run, the disadvantage of this is it’s a bit demoralizing to approach the finish line on the first lap knowing you have to do it all over again. The advantage is that it gives you a chance to familiarize yourself with the course, so that when I approached the finish for the second time I was able to kick and start overtaking some of the other competitors. I stopped short of overtaking one guy right near the line though. It’s not the Olympics, after all.

So that was that, I finished, had a great experience and finished with enough left in the tank that doing the Olympic distance race in London didn’t seem impossible. Because of the timing chip mishap I didn’t get accurate split times for the transitions and the bike, but my total time in the end was 1:42:37, which is not great but not that bad either for a first try. All in all I can’t recommend this triathlon highly enough, my mother couldn’t say enough about how well organised it was and also how well exiting the car park compared to a Robbie Williams concert.

London Triathlon 2008

By the way, I’ll be participating in the London Triathlon on behalf of Epilepsy Research UK so if you’re interested in sponsoring me you can do so securely online by following the link from JustGiving below.

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