This race is held in a small and unassuming town, located between Amsterdam and Utrecht, which has the distinct honors of giving its name to the New York borough of Brooklyn and hosting the first triathlon of the season here in the Netherlands.
The former was due to the Dutch West India Company staking its claim on the small village just off New York during the days when us Europeans were dividing and conquering a whole new continent that wasn’t ours. The latter has more to do with the fact that the Rabo Breukelen Triathlon uses a pool swim, so cold lake waters don’t force this race to go later in the calendar.
It’s a nicely organized and enjoyable race which I also did last year. With that in mind, I decided to enter again this year just to compare and contrast and get a firmer grasp of what sort of shape I’m in.
So, what sort of shape am I in? Er, well, it’s still hard to tell…
Almost exactly the same time as last year which is good news given that I’d only managed one swim a week for the past few weeks due to my vacation and public holidays robbing us of masters sessions. I was in a lane with some pretty good swimmers and, after the start, which was a bit mental, we organized ourselves into a solid pace line. I probably could have pushed a little harder but I was benefiting from being on the feet of the guys in front, so decided just to stay there and conserve a little energy.
T1: 1:03
Traditionally a weakness – especially this early in the season – this was very decent and about 45 seconds up on last year.
Bike (40.5km): 1:06:48
This is where it gets tricky. I was looking forward to seeing how my biking was going as I felt like I’d worked particularly hard on the bike and was cycling really well. The first and last parts of the course are a little technical – lots of corners, cobbles, a couple of u-turns, a bridge or two… - so I lose time there. But the nice thing about having raced this last year was that I was feeling purely competitive against myself. I didn’t care what anybody else was doing; I just wanted to show myself that I was improving.
For the most part, it was a fairly uneventful ride. I kept pushing hard and rode strong throughout. A glance at the power meter towards the end of the ride told me that I’d need to rethink my ftp as I’d pushed considerably beyond my current figure.
So, I must have ridden much faster than last year, right? Wrong. I was almost 90 seconds slower. But this is where times don’t tell the full story.
Conditions were lovely. Sunny, not too cold, and there was a pretty steady but not strong crosswind on the out and back bike course. Last year, there’d been a big headwind heading out and tailwind coming back. A couple of big bunches of 4-5 riders had caught me in the first half of the bike last year and, while being careful not to draft (we were watched throughout by a judge on a motorbike), I definitely used the protection those groups provided (as well as the mental carrot) to keep speed up into the headwind while, after the turnaround, I was averaging 42kph plus. This year, for some reason, it was basically a true solo 40km time trial. A group of four (clearly drafting) went past very early and then a couple of ones and twos went past later in the ride. The rest was ridden alone.
Even so, I was averaging at least 1-2kph faster than last year until around the 38kph point where there was a roundabout before we headed back into the more technical part in town. It wasn’t so clear that I needed to go around on the bike path and I ended up on the road. With a bridge ahead, I tried to hop through a gap in the curb to get back onto the bike path but I hit it with a sickening thud that shook my head in my helmet. I knew immediately I’d blown the front tyre to bits.
I decided against stopping and filling it with Pitstop, maybe thinking I was closer to T2 than I actually was, and decided to try riding back to transition on the rim. Obviously this took my average time right down to 15kph (especially as there were sharp turns and much of the route back was over cobbles). Finally coming into T2, I couldn’t even do a quick dismount as the bike wasn’t rolling enough, so I stopped, jumped off and headed into transition feeling just as deflated as my tyre.
T2: 1:02
Little slow but understandable given the circumstances.
Run: 40:43
The run conditions were almost identical to the previous year and I ran exactly 1 minute slower. I think a small part of this was feeling a little mentally defeated. I’d considered pulling the plug on the bike but realized that rolling back to T2 was probably my fastest way to get back, and also thought about not coming out of T2 as I knew I’d been significantly slowed. I’m pretty proud that I had the mental strength to suck it up, carry on and treat it as a tough training day – the sort of training day you can’t mimic in actual training.
After the ultramarathon last winter, I was running particularly well last year and I know it’s taken a little longer for my run to come to me this year, so the time was probably no surprise. But, after a tough day, a slow run felt like a bit of a kick in the teeth for some reason…
Final time: 2:02:53 (compared to 2:00:02 last year)
Thoughts, impressions and excuses… er, I mean explanations:
My wife was waiting as I crossed the line and I have to confess, in spite of her support and congratulations, I was pretty disappointed with my race. Of course, it was a very low priority race and the time was very explainable, but the main reason for the disappointment was that I simply hadn’t been ‘feeling it’.
The days prior to the race were crazy. We returned from vacation at 2am on Thursday morning, and I had early starts for busy days in work on both Thursday and Friday, as well as a bunch of other things to do. I played an hour of football on Friday night (it was the last game of the season, so I really didn’t want to miss it, and I took it easy on the pitch but in retrospect could definitely feel some extra soreness in the legs).
I didn’t even get the bike ready until late Friday night and, when I did, I discovered that a) my race wheels had a flat tyre so I needed to race on training wheels b) my tri bike didn’t go into the small cog and the gear shifter was loose (neither an issue for the race – just a demonstration of lack of prep) c) my helmet was in a state of slight disrepair and d) I had no idea where my race belt was e) I now had about 5 hours of sleep before I had to get up!
Small things. But I’m a planner. Especially for races. I like to feel prepared. Preparation makes me calm, happy and focused. Instead, I was snappy and stressed. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have raced.
That said, maybe that’s why it’s very important that I did race. Firstly, it was a reminder not to take any of this for granted. Having time to be fully prepared is important to me, not just for performance but for my enjoyment of the race and feeling like I gave it my all. Secondly, it was a slap in the face to get my arse into gear. By Saturday afternoon, I had booked my bike in for a full service, ordered new tubular tyres for both training and racing wheels, planned a good sports massage, and decided to skip the small sprint tri I’d entered next weekend. I’m not scared to race – I’ve seen that happen to some people before – but I’ve another busy week ahead and I want to take my time to get back up to speed (more in terms of life than training).
The few days in between have turned that disappointment into optimism and motivation. The swim is where it should be. And even if I’d rolled into T2 at 30kph for that last couple of kilomteres, I’d have been at least 3 minutes quicker overall – which would have been a great result. The run may not be where it was last year, but it’s also a long way ahead of where it was just a few months ago.
Sometimes a bad race, like Batman, is not the hero that you want but it is the hero that you need.