Super Series Rd 2 Leeds, 11 Jun 2022

The first time I raced in Leeds was in 2016; my first Super Series season as a youth athlete. It was an aquathlon which suited me back then as I loved running, was a strong open water swimmer, but had relatively little bike experience at that time. I had finished 14th/40 competitors despite being the youngest in the race. It was my best finishing position of the season and one of the races that I’m still very proud of - for this reason going back up to Leeds is always special.

Six years on and times have changed a bit. The bike has gone from being my weakest discipline to my strongest and I unfortunately don’t quite have the same super long run stride as I used to. Nevertheless, towing the start line at Leeds is always an incredible racing experience. Who wouldn’t love racing on the same course as the pros or hearing the heart palpating WTCS music before you dive into Waterloo Lake! The crowd, even at Super Series/Age Group level, is always electric. You have people cheering you the whole way round the course - I typically spend most of my time on the run trying to figure out who just cheered me on rather than focusing on the race (oops)!

This year marks the last year that the WTCS series will be visiting Roundhay Park, so I really wanted to make the most of racing here - so I decided to race twice! On Saturday I raced in the Elite senior Super Series and on the Sunday, the British Triathlon Standard Distance age group championships. In the lead up to the weekend I was pretty relaxed about the prospect of racing twice but by race day it suddenly hit me what I’d actually set myself up for.

Saturday

Race morning ran pretty smoothly. I was calm, had a good warm up and was prepared to race hard. It was almost the perfect preparation to the race, until a friend and I got sent the wrong way to race start which meant we had to run across the pontoon from one side of the lake to the other to get to race briefing. The commentator thought it was hilarious and before you knew it the whole of the park knew: ‘we’ll soon be getting our senior Super Series women down onto the pontoon - oh looks like we have two athletes being really eager and already on there’.

Let’s just hope they didn’t have the cameras filming us too! And the embarrassment didn’t stop there… because I entered two races I couldn’t use the same name twice on my entry application, so I had to put my middle name down:

‘Lilly Esmeeeeeee Gibbs!’

Bit of a mouthful for the commentator to say as I made my way down onto the pontoon. Not long after the heartbeat music started, and the nerves finally kicked in. BANG. Into the water, two butterfly kicks and up into the chaos of swinging arms and splashing feet. I got a good start as I typically have good explosive speed. The unfortunate part of the race was that because I had one of the lower rankings I was towards the right end of the pontoon furthest from the first buoy. So, although I was level with the leaders until ¾ of the first straight, the time it took me to move across to the left meant I lost a lot of places to athletes who had the inside line. Despite this my swim was relatively strong compared to past races. I swam the 750m course in 10:14. It was then time for the long drag run up to T1. I made up quite a bit of time here on some athletes in front of me. Not too long after I mounted my bike, another small win as my elastic bands had finally not snapped beforehand (I’d brought new bands prior to the race as my existing ones had kept snapping too early) meaning I could smoothly pop my feet into my shoes!

I worked hard going up the first hill and then kept the pressure on for the first half a lap to catch the group in front. Here I took the front of the group, and similarly to Llanelli tried to get a chaingang going to catch a trio of riders about 100m up the road. When this didn’t work, I tried to string out my group around a dead turn. It was successful at first as I managed to put in about a 20m gap. I sustained this until the start of the next lap but unfortunately, I got caught into the headwind. I repeated this same tactic every lap. In hindsight this was probably not the best idea as the stochastic nature of my attacks built up the lactic in my legs and set me up for a hard run. With a bit more practice this could have been successful but a change in approach might be required in future races.

The dismount and run into transition was hard work. The lead back into T2 is uphill and I just couldn’t get any speed going. Luckily, I whipped my trainers on fast but had already lost some time to a group of 4 ahead of me. I didn’t lose too much time to them on the first lap but the climb on the second lap definitely took it out of me. I ran a similar time to Llanelli which I was initially disappointed with, but upon reflection this is a step forward as Leeds is hilly and has a trail section making the course a lot more cumbersome. I finished with one final sprint as I had another athlete hot on my toes.

I was pleased with my performance but even more pleased with the outcome which I didn’t know until the day after the race. 12th senior and 14th overall! Not bad considering I was ranked 30th going into the race. I’ve started not looking at race results until the day after the race. Arguably my performance is more important to me than results at this time, so as long as I feel I’ve raced as well as I could and executed parts of my performance that I was focusing on well, then I’m happy.

Lilly Gibbs

(check back for part 2)