BananaMan 2010

For the first time in the last few years, I had entered to race the BananaMan on my own to see how I could get on and to get some useful triathlon practice in before Antwerp in a couple of weeks time. Secretly, I had set myself the target of seeing how close I could get to the previous Team Time Trial times I had set over the past three years. The wind on Sunday made me think it was going to be tough, but as always with Eton, if it is hard one way, it will be great the other.

The swim went about as well as could be expected really - I would like to think the course is a bit long as I would hope i was not swimming 1:30/100m pace, but I managed to stay with and pretty much lead out a pack of two other guys for the whole 800m eventually getting out just under 12 minutes. Still, the swim felt comfortable and it hadn't take much out of me for the rest of the race.





On to the bike now and I had been playing around with my position of recent, mainly to make it a bit more comfortable for the half Ironman, but in doing this, I had realised that it was not set up very well in the first place. For a start, the saddle was way too high I think and I had not moved it as far forward as it will go either. Things felt good now and as I pulled out of T1 in the lead, I decided to get my HR where I wanted it (~160BPM) and then just keep it steady for the rest of the ride. Going away from the transition area was tough on the day with the wind, but coming back was awesome...knocking out 30mph on a TT bike is a nice feeling really, especially on perfectly smooth roads. Finished the bike and felt quite sure I was quite a way ahead of the next placed guy in my wave. I would only find out though as I headed back on the first run lap as to where he actually was.











Out on the run and the plan started off being to just see how I felt and see if I was going to be able to up the pace at all after hopefully not starting off that quick. The first leg was in to the wind but a quick look at the pace meant that I was running quite well, and more importantly, I did not feel that bad. So I kept it steady for the second lap and then opened it up a bit on the last lap. All in all, was not a bad run for me with an average speed of just under 16kph. It was also nice to see on lap 1 that there was no chance that the second place chap was going to catch me.

In the end, I recorded my second fastest time on the course meaning that I beat the previous couple of year's TTT times. Om the day, I managed to win overall (all age groups)I also managed to beat the relay and the TTT teams time. So, all in all, a nice little warm up race before Antwerp at the end of the month.

GARMIN OUTPUT