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Although they’re different courses I’ve been comparing my two pool sprint times. Roade 2009 and Beverley 2010.

* Roade Swim is 414m, Beverley is 400m
** Roade Run was 4.5k, Beverley was 5k

This was my last planned event of the year, entered for a bit of fun as it’s up near my parent’s home in the town I used to go to school at. It’s a pool sprint format; 400m swim, 20k ride, 5k run. I hadn’t trained much since MK Tri and the week before rather than cramming some final interval training in I went to Manchester for a beer filled weekend with mates instead. Ideally I was aiming for under 1hr15, 1hr10 would be great but probably unlikely considering.

The swim worked out quite well. I was in the 9.30am wave which seem incredibly civilised since the other races this year have been 7.30 or earlier. In fact I think I’d finished the Big Cow sprint by 9.30am! The wave consists of 8 lanes with up to 4 in a lane, theoretically all swimming around the same 400m time. However I’d given my 9minute/400m time based on Roade last year, whereas in training I’d been hitting around 7m30s. Luckily one of the other competitors in my lane had also given the wrong time and was swimming about the same time as me. Luckier still we were scheduled to head out first with the 2 remaining swimmers in our lane following at 9 minute pace. This meant we didn’t really need to overtake until the end of our 16 lengths so we didn’t get slowed up much. The other good thing was that the lane counters at Beverley Tri give you a 2 length warning so you know when to get out! That was probably my only major worry about this race!

I’d recced the ride the day before from the car and it looked flat enough. In the race I was able to stay on the big cog the whole way round and keep the cadence between 85-95. I was hoping to improve my bike pace a bit and get closer to 20mph average, but this didn’t happen – lack of saddle time really. During the recce it looked like there might be a few places (roundabouts & junctions) which might involve a stop, however during the race this didn’t happen – although I was instructed to bump up onto a path by a marshall to avoid a congested junction, which lead to a few minutes of confusion trying to get off it and back onto the road later.

The transition to run went okay. I didn’t really use my watch to monitor my pace and just headed out (because I was treating it as “a bit of fun” I think I probably didn’t push so hard). I briefly had to stop at the level crossing for a train. Probably about 10 seconds, but not long enough for the marshal to give me a time credit. No matter. The best bit was that this time because of the later start Jodie came to spectate with her cousin, aunt and Gran – so they cheered me on in Transition and across the finish line.

Final time was 1h14m27s, although my Garmin clocked it at 1h13m23s. It seems odd that the timing can be out by so much, and I did notice that the pool clock was registering 9.31.05 when we started not 9.30.05 (as scheduled). I’m taking it as 1h13m then!

It was quite good fun, I had no pressure on. I might be tempted to do it again next year even though the goal is to concentrate on the longer course events.