hart sprint triathlon – still old, still slow…
Running around the City at 12.15am trying to remember where I’d parked the car wasn’t perhaps the best of training ideas for the night (morning?) of an event but at least when I found it and realised there was already a frost on the windows at least knew it was going to be a cold one…
And so it proved to be. Bl**dy freezing in fact with a chill wind that absolutely cut through you, only for the intermittent rain to finish you off. Nice. And don’t forget the hail. I kid you not.
Hart Sprint Triathlon is a relatively inexpensive and cracking wee event run by Hart Council just down the road in Fleet Leisure Centre. Attended by about 450 competitors it has the local and friendly feel of a summer fete…but without the weather and tombola. Being sprint distance the disciplines comprise 400m pool swim, 20k road cycle and 5.5k off-road xc run. A nice loosener for the longer distance events ahead and the competitors you may know – me, Tony Marsh, Ian & Anna Lee Emery and Paul-who-takes-the-spinning-class-at-Charters all seemed as keen as mustard. Ty & Linda Elleker rounded off the people I knew in their roles as Chief and Finish Line Marshalls respectively.
Thankfully, and in short, it was a pretty uneventful but fun stretch of the legs. The swim was fine and I swam OK (but slow); the ride was OK (but slow) even though the blustery wind always seemed to be against you and the run was as expected when crossing ploughed fields and rough tracks following a couple of days heavy rain…slow (but OK this time!) The one unexpected surprise was a bridge being down and having to cross a knee-deep stream which almost necessitated another couple of swimming strokes! Oh and don’t forget the hailstones that accompanied me for part of the bike. Transition was however my usual time-wasting-and-place-losing disaster where I couldn’t get into or out of whatever I was trying to get into or out of. B*gger. Overall performance was OK but nothing special but at least this time out I was only overtaken on three occasions – once on the bike and twice on the run (by two of Ty’s Farnham boys who were really going at it hammer-and-tongs). Soooo all in all a cracking day out and any event which doesn’t end in either puncture or punch-up is alright in my book. And unlike my usual post-race ranting there will definitely be a next time/next year to this particular race.
For the record I was 125th in 1.16.26 (8.28 / 43.27 / 24.31) – decidedly average and very middle-of-the-road, but enjoyably so nonetheless.
Ian and Tony on the other hand were the top-dogs of the day being 31st and 46th respectively with damned respectable times of 1.07.25 and 1.09.00. In those conditions and for a couple of ol’ boys that’s moving at a fair pace.
