First Tri of the season, this is an odd distance. A bit of a Sprint+, 400m pool swim, 30k ride, 8k run. Results were:

Leg Distance Time
Swim 400m 00:09:46
T1   00:01:49
Bike 30k 01:09:31
T2   00:01:56
Run 8k 00:43:51

Swim was indoors, in a salinated pool. This was slightly unexpected (was expecting chlorine, wasn’t mentioned in the briefing), but was fine. Stuck on toes for the first four laps, then managed to get an overtake and set pace for the last four laps. Could have had a quicker pool time by probably ~45 seconds, but this will do.

T1 was mostly OK. Almost smooth enough, reckon I can get this down a bit further. Only mix up here was socks being wrong way around in transition. Marshall had earlier asked us to switch things around two or three times, it threw things off a bit.

Bike course was interesting. I came out and did a reccy on the Friday, having heard about Birdy Hill from another club member. I was glad I did the reccy, so I knew what was coming. It also gave me the chance to get a feel for the roads so I could have a bit of confidence on the TT bars - this is not a straight course. I ended up with a stop at the bottom of Birdy - something was rubbing, but I couldn’t find what. It wasn’t there on Friday, it was there on Sunday. Mechanic later found the rear wheel not quite sat right in the drop outs. That’s twice that’s happened on a race day…

Came in to T2 - and promptly crashed on the line. FFS. This is what I get for not practising transitions in the off-season. Nothing hurt more than my pride. Get up, chain dropped and locked against frame - CARRY bike in to transition facepalm, switch shoes (speedy), and … where? Seriously, where? Could not work out for love nor money where the run exit was for T2. Right, found it, and we’re off.

I had been advised the run course was “flat”. This was an estate agent’s description of flat. A more honest description would be “undulating”. It was however, a nice run route - one you could pick up a /bit/ of speed on after the first couple of kilometres. I was running for a 10K-ish pace (treating this race closer to an Olympic distance than anything else), so was surprised to see decreasing splits as the run went on. I wasn’t pushing too hard, and had a bit of juice left when I got back across the line.

I’m mostly happy with this - run was fine, bike was reasonable. Having the long descent before coming in to T2 may be a bit of a false flag, it gives the legs time to recover before the run. Southport is in three weeks and is entirely flat - it’s possible to end up burning the legs out on laying down flat power before coming in to T2. I’ll also need to get some open water time in before then.