It felt good to get racing again! Yesterday I did my first race since Ironman UK, which was the Bala Standard Tri.
Since my Ironman journey ended I've struggled with an annoying knee injury. Its nothing major, its just the side of my knee hurts after about 15-20 mins of running, then the pain subsides after about 30 mins and I'm ok for the rest of my session, only for the pain to reappear once my session is over. It continues to give me a little grief for the best part of the next day but after that it clears up until my next run session..weird!?
The physio reckons it is a patella tracking problem which, up until my race on Sunday, I had no reason to doubt. However, since racing on it, the pain seems to be on the bony bits just above the round bony 'sticky outy bit'. I guess I just need to take a couple of weeks off running and see how it goes. The good news though is that my calfs have felt great lately. Maybe it's due to my new Saucony Omni 8's which felt great straight out of the box and I haven't had that all too familiar calf tightness I usually get after wearing previous shoes. So happy days there!
Anyway, about the Bala race.... This was my first time in Wales, let alone doing a Bala event, and I really enjoyed it. Maybe it was the stunning scenery, the warm sunshine, the light winds or the fact that I managed a standard distance PB...whatever it was, it was a really enjoyable event!
At first, I thought it was going to be a different story though. As I drove to the venue the lake was covered in a thick layer of fog and the air temp in the car read 2 degrees! Now that's chilly, even for Wales! On top of that I soon discovered that we had to sign a disclaimer to say that we were happy to swim in a lake which had recently been declared as having "dangerously high levels of poisonous green algae"; I'd never heard of this stuff before and wasn't sure how harmful it was but I hadn't travelled all that way to to let a bit of poison stop me from racing!
Because of the fog and the fact that we couldn't even see the first buoy, the race was delayed for about 40 mins. Once the fog lifted the temperature shot up and the sun shone in a clear blue sky and the glass smooth (poisoned) lake was unveiled!
The lake was pretty flipping cold but I had a decent swim, stayed out of trouble and came out with a time of 25 mins 33 secs, and wasn't suffering from any mutations from the poison algae! I think........
The bike route was a straight forward 'out and back' on a pretty flat closed road. It was good to see plenty of race referees on motorbikes keeping the drafting cheats at bay but they did get in the way sometimes. The route was a fast one and the winds weren't too bad with just the occasional front wheel wobble coming from my Sram 80 front wheel when a cheeky gusty crosswind gave me a slap! I clocked a time of 1 hr and 49 secs which I was pretty happy with.
Once again the run was an 'out and back'. By now the weather was gloriously warm. The first couple of miles were a bit painful as I struggled to find my run legs but once in my groove I settled in to my running. After the turn round point I felt great (relatively speaking!) and picked up the pace a tad and I seemed to enjoy the pain and posted a faster second half! My run split was 39 mins 12 secs, which meant an overall time of 2 hrs 7 mins 41 secs, giving me 73rd overall out of a field of about 850 and 7th in age group.
So, quite happy with my race overall. It felt good to feel the pain of high intensity racing again after my long course efforts!
As for the rest of the season, I may try and squeeze another sprint race in before I rest my knee....but don't tell the wife!
Train smart.
