Leeds Standard Triathlon, 12 Jun 2022

Part 2 - Sunday

Day 2 was a really early start, as I was already registered by 5:30am. Swim start being 8am gave me less than 12hrs recovery from my race on Saturday. I felt ok but my hip, knee and ankle on my left side were quite sore with no clear explanation. Unlike the Saturday race we started in the water holding onto the pontoon and wedged between other athletes. It was quite unnerving as there were so many people and even before the claxon went I knew the start of the swim was going to be a blood bath trying to search for clear water. I started hard, trying to get to the front of the swim as quickly as possible. I just missed the feet of the lead two swimmers but managed to settle into a group of 4. I was sandwiched between 2 swimmers for the duration of the swim, which was quite annoying as it affected my arm turnover. The swim was still relatively good as I came out the water in 3rd place in a time of 21:09. This was about 20s slower than last year but still a good performance.

Once again I dashed up the blue carpet towards transition undoing my wetsuit in the process. My transition was a lot smoother than Saturday’s race, so I was pleased. Onto the bike, I span out up the hill, conscious that the race was longer and building up lactic early on would not be beneficial. Soon, I settled onto my clip on TT bars. The first outward stretch of the ride was hard work, it was into the headwind and uphill. This was followed by two proceeding downhill-uturn-uphill sections. I unfortunately lost time to TT bike riders on the downhill however, I held my own on the uphill. Some of the men who were already on the course seemed pretty stunned at the rate I was overtaking them which made me laugh! Following the final uphill of lap one there was a long a gradual descent back to the start of the lap again. I worked hard for a minute putting down as much power as I could into the highest gear I had available. I was flying! The second lap was tough- as we made the u-turn back out onto the course for the second time I could feel the headwind once again. This is where I could have really done with having a TT bike as the ladies who were behind in hot pursuit of me went past making light work of the conditions. Nevertheless, I gave the second lap all I had.

Despite the bike being double the distance and having way more climbing and dead turns than day 1, I averaged a lot faster pace. This potentially showed me that I’m a lot better at holding a high normalised power than trying to do short fast attacks. Considering I was on a road bike I still had one of the fastest female cycles of the day.

Into T2 and onto the run, I initially felt very strong and got my legs going a lot quicker than the previous day. Lap 1 was ticked off quickly however my legs quickly took a turn for the worse and by lap 3 I was shuffling along. I honestly felt like I was lugging 10 tonnes of bricks up a hill. I knew I’d almost finished and by this point I had accepted the fact that the win was slightly out of my grasp. I turned my attention to staying strong and focussing on form as I made the final descent into the finishing straight. I crossed the line in 2nd place in the 20-25 age cat in a time of 2:19.21. I was a tad disappointed that I’d gone over 2 mins quicker the previous year (2:16.59) and was 9 mins slower than my PB but I’d done as much as I could given the state of my tired legs.

I’m looking forward to having another bash at the standard distance at BUCS on the 25th June. I know the swim and bike are in a good place, I just really need to be focussing on giving it my all on the run until the end!

Lilly Gibbs