25 days & £350 to go…

September 3, 2014 · Posted in Triathlon 

Yes, I felt as bad as I looked

Immediately after the Ely “Sprint” Triathlon

On Sunday 31st August I took part in my first actual Triathlon, the Ely Sprint event. This consisted of a 300m swim (in an outdoor heated pool), a 20km bike ride and a 5km run. I finished up with a total time of 1:16.59 which I was actually pretty pleased with considering the heat of the pool and the cross country nature of the run course…but boy did it ever hurt!

If the “Sprint” Triathlon last weekend proved one thing it’s that I’ve got a lot of running to do in the next 25 days. The swim was pretty good although not quite as quick as I’d like. I’m putting this down to the water temperature (I heard someone say 31 degrees!) and the curved nature of the ends of the pool. That might sound odd but it makes it pretty hard to spot the distance to the wall properly and meant I almost missed a couple of turns. As expected, I also went out too fast, something I need to make sure I’m more careful about when I’ve got a whole mile ahead of me rather than just a few pool lengths.

The ride felt good even though the Ely course is quite rough. It feels quite nice to overtake someone riding a full Carbon bike complete with aero frame and disc wheels on my little Cube, although it may have meant I was going along a bit quicker than planned in some areas.

Despite having done several brick (bike to run) training sessions, my legs felt wiped out right from the start of the run. I think I walked once over the whole run but that was up one of the steep little hills that were on the course. I was happy enough with 29 minutes for the 5k run, it’s not much slower than I’ve been running the Saturday morning Park run at Milton Park, but the way my legs were feeling I’m not sure I could have gone round again for a full 10k.

So the next 3 weeks are going to be all about running. I’m doing some shorter (2 mile) runs to try and get the average speed up a bit and will be doing some longer runs at the weekends at a slower pace to get used to running with dead legs. If I’m really lucky my toenail will have started to grow back by the time the main event comes around too! If anyone asks me in the next few weeks what I’m doing exercise wise and it doesn’t include the word running your next question to me should be “Why aren’t you running?”

Finally as of this morning I’ve hit £650 of my £1000 sponsorship target for Cancer Research which I still think is nuts. A massive THANK YOU to everyone who’s sponsored me so far and if you haven’t yet I’d be extremely grateful for anything you could offer. Donations can be made on my Just Giving page, just giving.com/jodrell

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