Triathlon, did it and survived…..just!

Maybe it was because I looked at the London Marathon as a particularly daunting task – running for 4 and half hours over 26 and a bit miles. Maybe it’s because I run a half marathon as a leisurely Sunday Morning friendly run up and down some pretty steep hills. Or maybe I just totally misjudged the whole triathlon sport completely and utterly but this is one of the hardest things I have EVER, ever done – much harder than the marathon.

I figured that I run lots so 5km is nothing. I used to complete in the Polaris Challenge with Peter (long suffering husband) in the days before children. The Polaris is a 2 day orienteering challenge on mountain bikes, usually on the weekends the clocks go forward or back – end of October and March – so pretty cold, and they take place in different areas every year, usually somewhere mean and steep like the Black Mountains, North Yorks Moors, Kielder, Exmoor – you get the picture. For the Polaris you have to carry all your food, tent and survival gear on your backs on the overnight element. The last time we did it, we did it on our MTB Tandem and Peter hit a rock on the side of a mountain, tipped us both off and I broke my arm – continued to cycle for another 5-6 hours though!!!

So after all that 16 lengths of swimming, 20k bike ride and 5k run should take my under 90 minutes which isn’t as long as it takes me to do a half marathon nor as long as my usual Sunday runs so although I never dreamt it would be easy, I really didn’t bank on how bad I felt afterwards.

Oh, well there is also the fact that I only learnt how to do the crawl 6-7 weeks ago but I’m pretty fit so that shouldn’t really matter.

The Friday before the race I took the dog out for a quick run – 2.5 miles – through the woods involving a steep climb straight up the hill then nice leisurely run through the woods slowly coming down. Halfway up the steep climb I went over badly on my left ankle. I know it was bad and something crunched, it involved a lot of pain and I knew instantly that I had to get back to car and try and drive home quickly – If I could use the clutch, which was doubtful. Managed to catch the dog who was very cross at having a 5 minute run not a 30 minute one – he knows the route and wanted to keep going, drove home and put ice on the ankle and figured that i didn’t have a hope of competing on Sunday even if I could walk by then.

Called the chiropractor and begged on Saturday morning so with a little manipulation and some ultrasound the lovely Paula said that I was OK to do the race but not to take painkillers and if it started hurting to stop immediately.

Sunday – bad night with the dog who kept barking and waking us up due to thunderstorms – had to be at the event at 7am, luckily only 10 minutes down the road. The swim was interesting – my ankle hurt as soon as I started doing crawl so had to revert to breatstroke for around half of the lengths, final time was 10:09 rather than my 9 minutes in practice. the bike bit, this didn’t feel good, couldn’t get comfy on my bike, Pete had had aerobars fitted but they didn’t fit me properly and ended up wiggling around trying to get comfy, awful time of 44 minutes, then the run, this wasn’t bad at 28 minutes. Total time 1 hour 25 mins, OK for a first attempt with sprained ankle.

I took a couple of carbo gels as I felt like flaking out a little at the end of the cycle and start of the run but 2 hours after the race I crashed and felt like going back to bed, fought it and kept going but felt awful for the next 2 days – actually I haven’t done much at all this week, no swimming, biking or running – lots of dancing though and my ankle isn’t happy!

Maybe I need to take triathlon more seriously and put in some intensive training over the 2 x swims a week, 4 x runs and 1 x cycle – need to focus on the cycle element as that really let me down – if you’d done tris before and have any advice I’d be really grateful.