Leeds Sprint Triathlon, 11 Jun 2022

I did my first sprint triathlon at the WTS in Leeds last weekend. I was pretty relaxed leading up to the event, but got a bit panicky before I started swimming as I realised I hadn’t open water swam yet this year. This wasn’t helped by a swan swimming in front of me about 200m into the swim! After this I got into a rhythm and managed a pretty good pace.

One very long transition later (a kilometer run to transition and then another 400m run to the bike mount line) and I was onto the bike course. It was very busy with people from the Sprint Tri and Go Tri on the course all at once, however, it made me feel fast as I was overtaking a lot of people. Considering the 11 dead turns on the course, that were all very congested, I managed to maintain a pretty good average speed.

Then onto the run which started with a killer hill! (they seem to like putting hills at the start of each of the sections) It took me a while to get into the run as I had a stitch for the first 3km but in the end I was just very happy to get around the course.

I ended up with a time of 1:40:34 - in which nearly 11 minutes was in transition running all over the place to start the next discipline!

I managed to come 45th woman out of 149 and 4th in my age group so overall I am very happy :)

Jess Barratt-Drylie