On the Wednesday before the big weekend of racing at London, I received a call from my mate Dion, they wanted me to do the bike section in a team relay where we would be taking on none other than three GB athletes. Ok, they were ladies, but beating them would by no means be pushover, especially as they had a few Beijing medals between them. They had received a bit of publicity prior to the event as they were going to make a stab at beating the girl's record for the team sprint at London Triathlon. We preferred to stay under the radar for fear of being totally shown up :)
The format for the triathlon was a 400m swim, 20k bike and 5k run with Dion on the swim, me on the bike and Tristan on the run. Dion managed to stick with Patten for a fair amount of the swim, but in trying to move on to her feet, she pulled away with about 200 to go. Patten exited the water with about a 60s lead, but this had reduced by the time that we handed over the band, mainly thanks to some deft transition skills in terms of bike placement and knowing how to run out of the water.
At the start of the bike, I think Romero had about 60 seconds on me. As I set out, I had a sinking feeling that she would just continue to hammer home the advantage from the swim. At the first roundabout, I could see Romero coming back and I realised at that point, they were certainly not putting any time in to us, in fact, I thought I must be catching her. Don't get me wrong, this was only a couple of k's in and my HR was already through the roof, I was feeling good though so continued to make my way past all of other athletes, just hunting down the black outfit of Romero. Within a few minutes, she was in sight and not long after I had managed to pass her as well (possible cycling career highlight).
Now, it was all about trying to see how much time I could gain to ensure that Tristan was not going to be too troubled on the run. By the third turn of the two laps, I could see that I put a fair amount of time in to Romero and was confident it should be enough. Tristan had told me he would not be happy unless I returned with snot over face etc, so had to make sure I pushed all the way back to the Excel.
Eventually came in with about a 90 second advantage which was well enough for Tristan not to get caught. He managed to knock out a 17:40 for the very long "5k" and we eventually all crossed the line in 1:01, setting a new record for the men and also beating Team GB by about 90 seconds.
Having beat the ladies, we were pleased to see that the story was picked up by a few of the tri related news sites, but most importantly the Sunday Times where we even had a mention!
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For me, this was to be the highlight of my season with pretty much all of my preparation to date being focused on just doing well over this distance at this event. For the four weeks leading up to this race, I had been spending every Saturday just doing lap after lap of Regent's Park on the TT bike followed by a run. These were going well too, I had pretty much worked out (probably for the first time) how easy I need to take it on the bike to give myself a fighting chance on the run.
So, after all of this, to suddenly find that you have a bit of a sore throat on the Tuesday and by the time you arrive in Antwerp, this has developed in to a full blown cold, one can feel slightly disappointed and annoyed for putting all your eggs in one basket.
Still, I was not so unwell that not starting was on the agenda so I headed down to T1 on race day to get things ready. At the start of the swim though, and in doing the first bit of high intensity stuff since getting ill, I realised straight away that I was not good. I was coughing in the water, so decided to just find some feet and try and sit on them, the thinking was, I was only going to lose about 1-2 minutes in the swim so better to just get through it with the maximum amount of help.
Out on the bike though and things felt relatively good. I was sticking to my plan quite well in terms of drinking frequently and making sure that I was never pushing that hard etc. By the time I had got to about 50k, I had worked my way quite far up the field whilst still feeling quite good. It was when I looked at the HR though that I got worried. At breakfast it had been higher than normal by about 10-15 beats and on the bike, for the perceived effort, it was just as high. Not good I thought, but at the time I figured the only way I had a chance of qualifying was to keep going to the plan and see how long I could get away with it.
Towards the end of the bike, I had my disheartening 70.3 moment. I was caught by one chap and then looked behind to see that he was simply spearheading a group of about 15-20 riders who were pretty much riding in a peleton. Kind of makes you wonder why you bother. Anyway, not wanting to simply brake all the way to, and then off, the back, I road with these guys to the finish...albeit, I tried to stay away from them as much as possible by riding in the middle of the road etc.
T2 went okay and then out on the run things felt a bit worse than I was hoping. I felt hot but I was managing to stick with the 4min/km that I was hoping to stick to for the run. This all seemed to be okay for about the first 5k, but then all of a sudden, I felt really hot and thought I was going to feint in the middle of the road. I stopped for a quick walk, but at that point, I knew it was all over. I felt rubbish and the illness had finally got the better of me. So, I started to adopt a run walk strategy to wait for Paula to catch me who was one lap behind. We eventually ran one lap together with P almost dropping me on a number of occasions, I was perhaps more of a hindrance than anything else - still, I blocked the wind when I could etc.
I eventually finished in 4:33 which including a 1:50 half marathon...I had been working towards a 1:24.
So, no Florida for me this year.....
