Stratford Sprint Triathlon - 13th May 2007.

Race report by Andy Fardon

Sadly this years Stratford triathlon clashed with the clubs training weekend meaning that only three members made up the numbers at this really well organised event. The three in question were Kat Copsey (as in Kat’s gossip column…I’ll say no more!), Andy Chalmers and myself.

The weather was cool and breezy, with spells of drizzly rain. This certainly helped keep your body temperature down, but it didn’t do much for the grass run at the end.

With over 1000 people competing, and start time ranging from 7:30am to 1:00pm, meeting up was always going to be a bit of a challenge for us.The race was over a 400m pool swim, a 23km bike ride and a 5km run. Out of the three of us, Andy C was the first one off and put in a swim time of 6:38 which was 38 seconds faster than he did last year. Unfortunately a combination of mechanical problems and ‘hitting the wall’, dropped his bike time by 3 ½ minutes against that of 2006. However, benefiting from a second wind, he finished his run in 22:27 giving him an overall time of 1:15:18. This put him in 134th place out of the 557 who finished the male race. However there were fleeting glimpses of the others along with the odd cry of support which is always welcome.

I went off second at just gone 9 o’clock and managed to shave 22 seconds off my swim time, and no, I didn’t manage to do it all front crawl! After all the effort that Tim, Nick and Tony have put into my coaching my front crawl for the past six weeks, my chances of convincing them that I managed to do the whole event freestyle were destroyed in one fell swoop when ‘guess who’ posted on the forum..."Wow, you really can do breast stroke faster than crawl.....Didn't quite believe it when you told me but alas it is true!!!"

The bike went really well, finishing in 40:46 which was the 22nd fastest time of the day. The run fell into two positive categories. Firstly, I didn't pull my calf muscle and secondly, I did a PB of 22:57. I finished in 1:12:03 which gave me my best ever position in a triathlon of 69th place!

Kat had injured her foot a couple of weeks before the race and had been struggling to run for more than about 20 minutes and was crossing her fingers that it would hold out through the race.

Setting off at just after 11am, Kat came racing into T1 after a 9:05 swim, pulled on her Man Tri running vest and set off in deteriorating weather conditions to complete the bike section in 53:46. With a run time of 32:29 and an overall time of 1:35:20, Kat finished in 134th place out of 233.

She later confessed to being a little disappointed in her performance. But given the conditions; she especially loved the 'run', or should that read 'mud slide?' there were no real complaints. Oh, that is except for the fact that she thought it was rude of them not to stop the clock for her when she had to throw up (twice) on the run!

All in all a really enjoyable and well run event that I would recommend to you all.

And just to end...Andy C, being thoroughly dejected by not beating his previous year’s time, went out on Tuesday evening and cheered himself up by doing a ten mile time trial in blustery conditions in 25:25. The gauntlet has been thrown down for a head to head at the Cheshire tri...watch this space!!

Position	Name	Swim	Bike	Run	Total Time
66/557	Andy Fardon	00:08:20	00:40:46	00:22:57	01:12:03
134/557	Andy Chalmers	00:06:38	00:46:13	00:22:27	01:15:18
131/233 (womens)	Kat Copsey	00:09:05	00:53:46	00:32:29	01:35:20

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