Race report: Bray Aquathon
My first race report in a long while that has not ended in a hospital stay.
Rocked up on a fine summers evening with the Carberry’s. I was tired from tot’s sleeping habits but sure what is new.
Registered, changed, jogged a little to warm up, some drills to get the hammers and hip flexors firing and then wetsuit on and into the water for a bit of a warm up. Took the wetsuit off to fix a pin that was stabbing me and then eventually got in the water for the off. A 750m swim, slightly against the current, deep water start. Mainly a straight line swim so that would prove challenging as I’ve never swam straight before.
Positioned myself at the front and the countdown became “10-9-8-7-5-4″ remembering something that I was told when I first started in the sport. Go on 3. So I caned it on 3. Went hard for the first 150-200m to try and get fast feet but didn’t get a single draft. After 300m my left shoulder, my bad one, was quite sore, I soon remembered that I have to put my wetsuit on in a particular way to stop the pain in the left shoulder. I swam surprising straight and sighted rather well. I have a pair of mirrored goggles that I need to make sure are okay as if I was going the other way I would have been blinded by the sun.
I had targetting a 12:00 swim and stood up in 12:30. Close enough. However I was very disappointed that if I had held this pace, it would only be a 1:15 IM swim, which would mean closer to 1:20, oh well it is what it is. Started to dolphin dive to shore. Nearly skulled myself on some large rocks. Curved slippy large rocks the whole way to shore. People around me starting hammering over the rocks. I paused and thought – “If you hammer over these rocks that are slippy and don’t allow sure footing what will happen, you’ll break your ankle like LD did and then game over”. So I gingerly exited the water in a very slow and cautious manner.
2:30 later I left transition, 15:00 in. I knew I could run as hard as I could turn my legs and not blow up as it was just a 5km and I didn’t have the speed to blow over that distance. So I ran as hard as I could. Averaged 182bpm or there about for the run, but to be honest I felt could have done it 3-4 more times. I crossed the line 16:26 later and immediately started chatting to Hugh. I could not have run any faster but it just didn’t hurt or take anything out of me.
Middle of the night I woke up and realised “An IM swim is 3800m, not 4500m, it was a 1:03 pace.”
A nice race, swam well considering that I’ve not been in open water since Austria 2009, ran well – was happy with how I ran, reckon the course was 500m or so short though. I think it bodes well.