Sunday 14 November 2010
A comedy of errors. It’s the only way to describe my performance at this race.
I last raced Nepean in 2007 and was quite looking forward to doing it again. It’s a short fast race around a nice flat course, with a good field. It was the 3rd race in a week – Run 4 Fun last Sunday, JP Morgan on Wednesday night and now Nepean.
My Saturday preparation wasn’t ideal, mainly because I put a new cassette on my training wheel at 10pm Friday night and screwed up the spacing. So riding on Saturday morning only a few gears were useable, I fiddled with the cable tension and generally mucked it up until I looked at the cassette and realised the problem. Back at home I spent a frustrating few hours meddling with the gears and trying to get the damn thing to work, before I finally called in the big guns and got Matt over to sort the whole thing out – which to his credit he did fairly easily. But it was a long day of rage and frustration, then a late night out, a disturbed sleep with the heat and over-active cats jumping all over me, and a 4am wake-up (half an hour before the alarm). I was shattered.
But it was a short race, I’d be right. Picked up Christian and we headed out on the long drive west. Racked up the bikes without incident and then waited by the swim start for our wave to come around (the last one). It was only 7am at this stage, but the sun was already like a furnace, so it was clearly going to be a bloody hot race.
The swim wasn’t great for me. My swimming has been feeling really good lately, but somehow I just couldn’t get my speed up during the race. Wetsuits were disallowed because the water was too warm, but that doesn’t bother me. The wave was small enough that there was nobody near me to impede my progress and it was a completely straight course, so no sighting problems. I just couldn’t put my foot on the gas. But it was only 1km and was over quickly enough. I didn’t have a watch on, but afterwards saw my time as 19:13.
Transition was fast. I had my shoes attached to the bike and went sockless and even though I haven’t tried this for a couple of years, it wasn’t that difficult. After a couple of minutes I got up to speed and my legs felt great, I thought this is going to be a good bike leg. Out of the Regatta centre, down the road and about 8 minutes in we started the twists and turns of the industrial area. Second bend and I heard a loud “PFFFFFT!” followed by a staccato outrush of air as my rear tyre rapidly deflated. Bugger.
I pulled around the corner, jumped onto the grass and turned the bike upside down to get the wheel off. At which point the entire contents of the profile bottle between on the bars emptied out instantly. That meant no water for the entire ride. This wasn’t looking good.
Thankfully the tyre change was no problem and only took a couple of minutes. As I was putting the wheel back on, a girl came around the same corner and jumped off her bike swearing. There must have been some glass on the road if we both flatted at exactly the same spot. I called out “Are you ok?” expecting a yes, but she countered with a vehement NO! So I got my wheel back on and walked over to find her pumping madly with the hand pump. I asked if I could have a quick look, and the tube was completely flat.
Taking the pump from her I mentioned, “Hmmm there’s a couple of reasons you’re having a problem. One is that the tube valve needs to be open in order to get air into it. Two is that the pump lever needs to be flicked up. And three, seeing that the tube is totally deflated, it’s probably punctured so you’ll need to replace it first. Do you know how to do that?” No.
So I whipped off the wheel and changed the tube. Fortuitously at this point a mate of hers came by and stopped to hand over a CO2 canister, so I got the wheel back up to full pressure, slapped it back on the bike and said good luck as I took off.
It wasn’t until later that I worked out I had been off the bike for about 11 minutes. As this point – since I was in the final wave – the only people still on their first lap of the course were grandmothers on mountain bikes. I rode pretty much alone for the rest of the way, trying to push, but when there is nobody fast around you, it’s super hot and you’ve got no water, and you realise you’ve already blown your race, it’s really difficult to motivate yourself enough to get into the hurt box.
So I rode comfortably hard and finished the bike leg, then came into transition almost delirious for fluid. Racking my bike I saw the guy next to me had half a bottle in his cage, so I threw that down my parched throat and ran off. Getting out of transition I looked to my Garmin and realised that it was still attached to the bike! I considered running back for a second, but thought bugger it, I’ll just run by feel.
Let me tell you, it is very difficult to run by feel when the only people around you are essentially walking and it’s about 35 degrees in full sun. So you have no idea of your pace, no idea of your effort level (it all feels hard) and very little incentive to kill yourself. Again I managed to fall into a comfortably hard pace and just tried to keep that going. It’s a flat, featureless, roasting hot run course and a lot of people appeared to be suffering. There was plenty of walking going on due to the conditions.
I came over the line with no idea of what I’d done, and while it was a fairly enjoyable race, it certainly wasn’t a highlight for me. I would have preferred to have been in the thick of it with people to chase down or try to stick with. Having said that, the flat wouldn’t have made a huge difference. My slow swim in the final wave really put me too far at the back to have had a proper crack at it.
Christian, Pete, Richard, Clyde, Chris Eagar and Tim Lindop all seemed to have very good races. Christian really smashed it. It was too hot to consider hanging around for the second race with teh fastest finishers squaring off. To be honest I'd sort of had enough, so Christian and I went home. I spent the rest of the day in the sun at the Newtown festival and I think I gave myself heatstroke!
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