|
Moonsail Limited
Making Words Work For You |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Triathlon Story
Last week I took part in the London Triathlon and despite the blazing heat on the day, managed to turn in a respectable time. The bike race itself was the easy part – the bigger challenge was finding my way to the venue…
With my terrible sense of direction and my wife’s hatred of traffic jams, it made sense to set off in plenty of time. Rather than face the prospect of certain heavy traffic on Saturday morning, we set off late on Friday night to spend the night in one of the Docklands hotels. Despite my inate inability to make head or tail of a simple map, I somehow managed to navigate within a mile of the Excel centre then spent about half an hour directing us round and round in circles trying to find the hotel.
Luck was on our side however, as we’d managed by chance to pick the hotel closest to the venue itself (an excellent Premier Travel Inn). Although my race wasn’t happening until 5pm on Saturday, I still had to get there for around 1pm to rack my bike, show my ID and so on. I was using a late 80s Falcon Team Banana bike (see photo above) which was close to state-of-the-art in its day and although a relative ‘classic’ nowadays can still outperform many a younger and lighter machine.
The Sprint Team Relay began at 5pm, getting off to a bad start when our swimmer got whacked in the face upon entering the water (losing his goggles in the process) and suffering cramp at the halfway mark. I took over the timing chip around 5.30 and headed off on the bike for an intense 20km of fast riding. Although my trusty old Falcon had cost me less than £100 including parts, I found myself blitzing past riders on far newer (and much more expensive) machines – proof that you don’t need to spend loads of money to find a decent bike, even for Triathlon riding.
The 20km went by in a bit a blur: months of training distilled into one 40 minute mad blast. The hardest part was riding up the steep finishing ramp followed by the 100 yard sprint to hand over to the runner (more knackering than the actual bike ride) although I recovered quicker than I expected – another effect of training for so long.
In the end, my team finished in just over an hour and a half, a respectable result, and I came home with some fantastic memories of the day AND a medal to prove I was a participant. Whether I’ll do it again, I’m not sure yet. But when Dad asked me if I was going to resell the racing bike now I’d done the race, I realised how attached I’ve become to this striking yellow bike and how reluctant I am to part with it. Time will tell if this is sentiment talking (oh, but that was my triathlon bike etc) or whether it’s because part of me plans to give it another go next year…
|
|
