Race Report - ITU Cross Triathlon - Targu Mures

Buckle up. This one might take a while. In fact it has taken me so long to write it that I am back at the airport as I type, and not even for my next race! I have been to and from Bratislava for the World Aquathlon, and Bilbao for 3 Euro Champs events in between and I still have to write up those trips...

...and now it is the Xmas holidays and I have no excuse not to finish these before next year rolls round! 

Anyway...

I did a quick swim recce the day before. I only swam 200m through what was a mess of weeds that was as bad as anything I have ever seen. But I got out and saw the state of other people who were terrified of the conditions and decided I was much happier than average, and that plenty of people were going to struggle, and panic, and likely some would even get pulled out of the swim. I had no real concerns about being one of them. I have done weedy swims before and I knew that a lot of the people I was racing were specialist mountain bikers, so I expected to be somewhere near the front of the swim and well out of any trouble. 

Then, overnight, they changed the swim course. Changing us from 1x1,000m lap to 2x500m laps with an Australian exit. This was done so that they could try and clear some of the weeds from that lap of the route. Again, fine by me, same conditions for everyone, and clearer water would be better to swim in. 

With the split transition it meant riding up to T2 to set up in the morning and then rolling back down the hill to the start line and T1. 

Arriving at T1 and the swim location, and the officials still don't have a temperature decision on wetsuits. So we all go in and set up for T1 without actually knowing what we need in T1. I lurk around till we are inside the 60-minute mark for them to make their decision and then ask an official. They decide the water temperature was 25C (it wasn't) so that no-one would be allowed to wear wetsuits. This decision was almost certainly fudged to avoid having some age groups in wetsuits and some without wetsuits from going in the same heat.

So, no wetsuits. Not ideal, but the same for everyone, and there were still lots of 'average' swimmers in this race that were heavily reliant on their mountain biking. So I was happy enough. I knew I could cope with the water conditions, and still expected to be up near the front of the swim pack. 

The organisers again decided to cut the heats at age 45 so I was in the youngest (and theoretically fastest) age-group in my heat. The under-45 heat went off 10 minutes in front of us and were just coming round on their first lap as we got in to the water.

We get called up and into the water and up to the start line. I was not the last in the water and the line was only about 15m from the bank, but before I could even get to the front line, the starter called 'on your marks' and then blew the horn for the start. This meant I was two rows back, and as well as the thick weeds, I now suddenly had a sea of older bodies to work through to get anywhere near the front of the swim. This is normally a minor inconvenience, but with the benefit of hindsight and some time to think about it, this is where things really started to go wrong and every disaster that follows cascaded from here. I need to learn to get in early and get near the front of swim starts.

The very old men in the cross triathlon are not great swimmers, but they are experienced and defensive swimmers. Getting past them was a nightmare. I was making some headway through them, but not a lot. I was getting punched and kicked and generally impeded for the first 200m. 

Then things went rapidly downhill. As we approached the first tight turn, on consecutive strokes, I got punched and then dunked. It was intentional, I have no doubts, and the weeds tangled around my neck before I could resurface, which gave me the start of a panic attack as I struggled to free myself and get back to the surface. 

As I resurfaced I managed to get a breath before the next swimmer grabbed hold of my trisuit and pulled it. The suit tore open, along the zip and down the back, and now I am basically swimming in a drag-chute. The front goes loose and the bottom at the back sags out and fills with water.

The 'advantage' of no wet-suits is that you can see everyone's tri-suit. So I know it was a Polish athlete that dunked me and then a German that tore my suit. But I was too busy trying not to drown to get their numbers, and there were no technical officials in the water to penalise them anyway.

This sequence was too much for my anxiety, and having identified that some people were likely to panic, I then had a panic attack. I managed to swim sideways out of the racing line and find a support kayak, who threw me a buoy to hold on to and pulled me in. As I got closer, he took the buoy back onboard and I instinctively grabbed the kayak. The kayaker then hit me on the head with his paddle as he was scared I would topple him. I asked for the buoy back and just held on to it and floated, while I tried to calm down. Garmin says I was there for just over 2 minutes as I let all of the rest of the race swim past.

Once I calmed down the kayaker asked if I wanted to continue and I decided I would, and would just swim round to the end of the lap and see how I felt. I was just paddling along from here. instead of my race pace (<1:40 / 100m) I was doing slightly inside 2:00 / 100m. I managed to get round to the Australian exit but as I got out to start the next lap I was already minded to quit the race. The photo below is from that point where I was signalling to the team manager that I was already wanting to quit. I dove back in with the intention of just finishing the swim and then packing my bike to go home. The second lap I swam slightly better and was catching some of the older back markers despite still doing about 1:50/100m. 

By the time I came to transition I realised that even if I quit at that point, at the very least I had to ride up to T2 and the finish as that was where all the kit bags had been taken. So I decided I would ride easily up to that section, and see how I felt at that point. 

I assumed at this point that my zip problem was just a similar issue to the one I had on the Cross Duathlon, where the zip teeth had let go, so I stopped in transition to fix it, but couldn't get it to work. I asked one of the Technical Officials to take a look at it for me and he informed me that the zip was completely torn from the material. That is where my anxiety turned into a full on strop. I didn't want to spend over 2 hours riding around in an uncomfortable and torn suit and then run on the back of that. I did manage to take a spare safety pin from my race belt and pin the top of my suit together to make it a little less uncomfortable. But all this time in transition meant that I was almost last to leave T1 on the bike. 

So, up the big climb, in a huff, mostly at myself, and trying to decide how far do I ride before I quit and go home. 

I was just spinning the pedals as I climbed. No intention of finishing the race and no significant effort level. I was mostly just trying to get my bike up to T2. I passed a couple of people on the climb, but they were older athletes from the ladies heat that started 10 minutes behind me. I felt ok on the bike and when I got to the top of the hill where it joined the looped course I felt a lot better. My suit wasn't physically annoying me anywhere near as much as I was annoyed about the damage. 

There were a big group of GB supporters clustered around T2 and the finish and as I rode through them I decided that I would just roll round the course, jog the run, and take my finishers medal. I knew I could physically get to the end from here as I have already done the course from here as part of the Cross Duathlon. I rolled out onto the lapped course with no intention of pushing hard or racing it, just taking part and getting round. And then the mechanicals started...

As an aside, this is the first time I have had a bike with a clutch mech on the rear and I had not realised that they need regular (almost monthly I have since found out) maintenance to keep them working smoothly. I had not been doing that maintenance as I didn't know it was needed and hadn't understood that the dropped chains earlier in the week were the first signs of the clutch jamming.

Now, I know that what I should have done is maintain the clutch pre-race. And then having dropped the chain anyway, I should have just disengaged the clutch as there wasn't anything rough enough on the course to warrant it. Instead I just remounted the chain and rode on. This meant that it would come off again regularly through the race. Usually during large gear changes  so at changes from fast downhills to sharp uphills. I thought I had about 5 stops, my garmin track looks more like 11-12, but some of those might just be frustration and exhaustion causing me to abandon short climbs and take a breather before pushing the bike up them. 

Each lap as I passed through transition I wanted to stop but the depth of GB support at that area encouraged me to continue for another lap each time. 

I have lost track of which race was which since it is nearly 7 months on, so I may have conflated this with the Duathlon, but certainly in one of the races,  on lap 3, during a long fast flat section, I had to do an emergency stop to avoid a loose dog on the course. That was a full endo despite being on soft-suspension settings on a full-sus mtb. I didn't crash it, but I was very close. 

On lap 4, I did crash. I lost it on a completely innocuous section of the course, but where the loose dust had become so loose that I slipped it sideways. I didn't hurt anything but my pride. But I did have to rescue my water bottle that had come out of the cage. At this point I realised that I had been sulking so much for nearly 2 hours on the bike that I had completely forgotten to take a drink and my bottle was still full. 

I did try to drink for the rest of the lap, but obviously by this point my brain was not functioning properly and I managed to crash again. This time flipping the bike backwards and hitting my head. That made a mess of of my back and cracked the back of my helmet. (I went for a concussion check after I finished and got cleared by the course doctor, but I had to bin the helmet).

I made it to the end of the bike, sat down to change my trainers, emptied an entire bottle of coke and then set off out on the run, but basically at walk / jog as if I was a couch-to-5k beginner rather than competing at a World Championships. 

At the end of the first of two "run" laps I had a bit of a cry as I realised that nearly 3 hours after my dunking, I was actually going to finish the race, inside the time limit, and get my medal. 

I am pleased I finished. I am disappointed with the result (9th place) and with my performance. More from a mental point of view than physical. One things started off going badly I should have just put them behind me and got on with the race rather than cascading into continuing issues.