This race was only one week after Lochore, and I was only holiday with friends for that week, so I took training easier that week. unfortunately on the sunday I got a sore shoulder when we were swimming open water, and sadly I couldn’t swim all week as a result. That was hardly ideal preparation but i did my best with what I had.
Usually this race takes place in March and determines who gets into super series, due to covid it had to be moved back. Its normal format stayed the same though, with a swim time trail on the saturday followed by a bike-run based off swim times the following day. I was very pleased with my swim (4.28) considering I hadn’t swam all week due to my shoulder. I was still a bit off my pb of 4.23, but I went out too fast in that so I think there is definitely more to come. That time put me in 8th place, 15 secs behind first.
Before the start of the bike you still had to do a transition as if you had just come out of the swim. My aim was to make the front bike pack so I had to have a good transition and go very hard at the start of the bike. I managed to make the front pack of 8. It was a very flat bike course and therefore very fast, and it was made even quicker by the fact that there was a chase pack not far behind us. My pack held them off until about the last 500m when that pack of bout 7 caught up. Immediately w after they caught up one guy from the chase pack went over then top ours and attacked. I didn’t want to follow him as I thought it was pointless. He had about a 5 second lead going into transition. I didn’t have a great transition and came out of transition in about 8th-10th. I went out quite quickly on the run but tried to save a bit for the end. I immediately started overtaking people and at the end of the first lap I was in 3rd, next to the guy who was second. It stayed like that until the last 50m when I sprinted past him and took 2nd. I had the joint fastest run and I was very pleased with my performance. Going into the race I was aiming for top 5 and maybe a podium and I had come 2nd as a 15 year old in the 15-16 category.
After the race I was now sitting in 2nd in the overall in the super series, and the next race coming up was Hetton where the age group would be 15-17.
Alex Robin Triathlon blog 