Mallory Park World Sprint Duathlon Championships Qualifier, 6 Mar 2022

My first multisport race!

Having only started triathlon in June of 2021, I had been tentative to sign up to my first race; I am an innately competitive person, so if I signed up to anything, I wanted my performance to be a good one. However, after a few months of training under Tim’s excellent coaching, I felt I was ready to push myself to do an event – so I signed up for Oxford University’steam in the Varsity Duathlon on 19th Feb. At this point, you may be wondering why this race report is titled Mallory Park – well, due to a very ill-timed cold, I had to give up my race place at Varsity and instead spent the weekend being very grumpy in bed. Having been mentally preparing myself to race for a few weeks, I was really disappointed not to be able to compete. As a result, as soon as I felt better, I started looking for another event to race in – Tim suggested the Mallory Park Qualifier event as an alternative to the Dorney event I was considering and so I decided to go for it!

With the race fast approaching, I returned to training post-illness with a new sense of purpose and in the hope that this event would give me additional inspiration to train throughout the rainy spring months in England.

Finally, it was the day of the race. I got to Mallory Park with plenty of time to spare, accompanied by my boyfriend, Alex, who did his best to distract me from my nerves on the 2 hour drive up to Leicestershire. Once there, I tried to familiarise myself with the course, while cheering on the men who were competing before me and meeting some of my fellow female athletes. Time flew by and my race was approaching fast - I donned my Catenary Coaching trisuit and new trainers, as well as an enormous dry robe I borrowed, and began warming up. It was a pretty gloomy-looking day, with a strong wind blowing across the race circuit, but the intermittent sun was pleasant and even encouraged me to put on some sunnies before the race!

My legs were tingling with nerves as I warmed up and I felt like I had to hold myself back throughout the warm up so as not to run too fast. This pretty much continued into the beginning of the first 5k, as soon as the horn sounded and we were off, I could tell that I had set out a little fast – my watch said 3:50/km and I knew there was no way I could sustain this for a 5k and still have juice left in my legs for the bike and second run! 

So I pulled back quite a bit and fell into an average of 4:13/km pace. The run didn’t feel bad, but it didn’t feel great either – honestly, my mind was on the transition ahead and the bike leg so I never felt like I got fully ‘into’ the run. Nonetheless, and despite grinding into a massive headwind for a portion of the course, I completed the run in a big PB of 19:45 (the distance was shy of 5k, but I’ll take it!)

Now into T1 – I didn’t have anything fancy planned for this one, just strap on the shoes and mount my bike, which is what I did, smoothly enough, and was out of transition and on the bike in just over 1 minute.

The bike! This was definitely the part that I was most worried about: 9.5 loops of the course, each one with a chicane, plus drafting – there seemed to be a lot going on. But actually this was by far my favourite part of the race (as you can see from the photos of me grinning like an idiot the whole way round the course!) I managed to buddy up with a fellow athlete and for the first 5 laps we picked riders off one by one. Then we managed to join onto the back of a small group and were absolutely flying! I was about 7 loops round and thinking - wow this is so much fun! That was probably when I started to blow – I got dropped by the group and ended up doing the last 2.5 loops struggling with the wind alone. I was still super pleased with my bike (20km in 39:42) but by the time I got off I was actually cooked!

T2 was a bit wobbly but I managed to do the transition I’ve been practicing without falling off so thumbs up for that.

And now they expect me to run again?! The last 2.5k were awful. About 800m in I could feel I was getting a cramp in my calf, 1.5k in I was basically just hobbling along, 400m from the end I was wondering if I should stop and stretch, but I could hear footsteps behind me and I’d already been overtaken by about 4 runners in this tiny loop! So I powered through trying not to cry, until we got to the blue carpet of the finish line and THEN someone tried to overtake me. And I thought “hell no”. My time for run 2 was 11:06 – 30sec/km slower than run no. 1.

My overall time was 01:12:31; I finished 2nd in my age group and 19th overall.

I’ve learnt a lot - I could have had a better race with a more conservative first run and maybe some more stretching on the day of the race, but on the whole I’m super pleased! It was a great first experience of racing, I met some really inspiring, friendly and encouraging women, and I managed to somehow qualify myself for the World Championships in Sprint Duathlon. Not bad for a first-timer!

Emilia Miller