Tonbridge Tri

[Marek]

First Triathlon of the season for me. Was pretty tough after the road race yesterday. Swim was quite tough as I have not swum since the London Tri last year, so not expecting too good a time. Got out of the swim and was huffing and puffing a bit.

Onto the bike course. The Tonbridge Tri has a 27km bike course and it is pretty damn tough, as I remembered when I hit the hilly section. It starts off flatish to get you into a false sense of security and then goes up and up and up for a bit. I really started to hurt on the hills, this is when yesterdays exertions really kicked in. At one point I was going about 15kph on a reasonably tame gradient. After the first hilly section you get some downhills which were a relief and I think I started to recover a bit. The second hilly section I felt a bit more comfortable on and started to catch a few other riders. Then you have a couple of really fast downhill sections which I blasted down, then with the wind behind me into Tonbridge I flew. Just a bit disappointed about the initial section where I really struggled.

Onto the 5km run and thankfully I had a few supporters, and Max was there so he ran a parts of the course with me which really helped me keep my pace up. Not sure of the results yet but will put them up when they are posted.

Well done to Marco who completed his first Tri, you were looking pretty relaxed on the run matey, will be interested to hear how you felt after your first one.

Cheers

Marek....

[Marek]

I bet you won't wash that number off your arm for a while

Cheers

Marek....

[HuwG]

Well done Marco, great effort!

I rang about a week ago to see if I could get a late entry, but no luck, so I ended up doing a 10K in Beckenham yesterday instead.

BTW, I use a trisuit and it works, some are quite expensive, but I'm sure there must be some cheaper versions about, no sleeves makes you think it will be cold on the bike, but I've never had that problem, in all my two Triathlons !
I've got a list of recommendations a mate sent me for transitions somewhere, I'll try and dig it out.

Once again well done, Tonbridge was my first Tri last year and I was asking Q's all over the place especially setting up the transition area, even by the second one, it was SO much easier!

Cheers H

[Maria David]

Well done Marco, you are now officially a triathlete !

Maybe I should have warned you that it would be really hard when I saw you at GB's the Saturday b4, but I didn't really want to put the fear of god in you.

Anyway, looks like you got through fine and your time was not bad either.

Hope you enjoyed it, and look forward to hearing more about your foray into triathloning.

You can get tri suits from Tri and Run (near Hainault), or when there is a big triathlon in the London area (Windsor, for example) you can usually buy one from one of the stands.

maria