Tatton Triathlon - Saturday 17-9-10 ( www.tattontriathlon.co.uk)

750m open water lake swim, 19km bike race, 5km run

Post event sponsorship !

A friend mentioned a few months ago that he was doing the Tatton Triathlon and was anyone interested in doing one with him individually or as a team. Sounded great, how hard could it be I thought ? Others do it and I'm not bad at cycling when I go out on a mountain bike a few times a year. So who was going to be in the team to do the swim and the run ?? As it happened no-one ! Everyone seemed to hate running, swimming or both ... hmmm, did it matter I hadn't run or swum since school and needed to learn quickly ? Of course not, how hard could it be ...

Anyway I didn't get to swim till August and  I had to do 8 lengths for my PADI scuba certificate and when I heard this I wondered if it was possible ! It was, just, but 8 was the limit that day but the next morning I got up more determined and managed the full 30 lengths or 750m but not in a good time and not *quite* non-stop !

Over August I managed a few more swims and even got up to over a km when I mis-estimated a pool length ! But in the end I only did about 10 practice swims before the event... and in nice warm water and with no wetsuit or tri-suit underneath. Oh and by the way I don’t do front crawl so it had to be breast stroke or back-stroke and I'd intended to learn crawl breathing over the summer but just getting to swim the 750m was as much as I could do. With hindsight a lot more practice and learning crawl would have been useful !

Running was equally bad as I don’t run normally except for trains I a late for so started jogging late July doing a few short runs near the house and did 3 full 5km runs in the end before the event. Towards the end, my hate of running began to subside a bit and I became ambivalent towards it - after all if you slow down or stop you don’t drown like you do if you are swimming !

The cycling seemed fine and I was getting faster and faster, especially when I swapped a chunky tyred mountain bike for a race tuned carbon race bike ;-)

I managed 2 full test triathlons before the event and was doing OK so how bad could it be... I hadn't counted on the ice-cold swim in a lake with a hundred other swimmers and constricted in a wetsuit !

The day came and I had a cold and a few late nights in the week and had only managed a run on a windswept beach in Wales one night but then you aren't supposed to do much in the week before. With my friend, Ru, who I had persuaded to do it as well, we stood in the cold dawn light and surveyed the grey lake through the mist..... too late now,,, and then my back tyre valve blew out when I pumped it up a bit too much ! Lucky there was a mobile bike engineer on site to change the inner tube quickly !

The swim was the most awful thing I can recall for a very long time ! The wetsuit restricted arm and leg movement much more than I thought, probably too tight, and the buoyancy was no compensation and after the first 100m I felt very strongly like giving up, or sinking ! That thought recurred stronger and stronger the further away from shore I got and I seemed to be last in my group, alone apart from one canoeist keeping an eye on me from afar ! Words cannot describe the pain as the wetsuit made it many times harder and Ru's idea of a sleeveless wetsuit suddenly seemed very appealing. After an eternity, several pain barriers, a few nice chaps from the wave 15 minutes behind me swimming over me, several lungfuls of lake water, and thinking of the embarrassment of not making it, I finally reached the edge of the lake again and apart from the pond-weed trying to drag me down I staggered out of the lake back into the transition area !

The cycle was relatively uneventful and I overtook as many as overtook me. The run however was made much harder with the much more stretching swim than anticipated and it was a bit tough but getting over the finish line was amazing - and my objectives of finishing and not being last were achieved !

The only way to describe that swim was not with words but with a guttural Neanderthal scream followed by death ! Never again I thought .... although now getting up to Olympic distance next year begins to sound tempting ... how hard can it be, other people do it !

Thanks for giving and I'll be back when the Tri season opens again next year !