National Mixed Team Relay Championships, 17 Jun 2023

Following the Tokyo Olympics, a few more mixed team relays have been popping up for us amateurs too and this year for the first time, the national mixed team relay championships were being held at Cholmondeley Castle. Dave and I are seasoned veterans to this race, just 2 times defending champions but no biggy. Keen to defend our title, we entered again with a Cambridge Triathlon team, with Conor and Teresa making up the other 2 team members. However just days before the race, an unfortunate accident at chaingang saw Teresa with a badly cut knee and 7 stitches. Honestly, chaingang on a race week, she needs to get her priorities straight! Thankfully, our hero of the day Julie stepped in just a few days before and drove the 6 hour round trip on race day to be our final team member. Legend!

The race itself saw each team member complete a mini triathlon of a 250m swim, 4.2km bike and a 1.5km run, before passing on to the next team member in transition. Like the new elite race, the order was male, female, male, female. Conor was off first, who managed a cracking 4th out of the water and hunted down on the bike to gain back 1 place, which he held onto on the run going full gas all the way and giving us a solid start.

At this point I reckon we were about 1min30 off the race leaders, which apparently in Julie's terms is absolutely nothing because she had managed to close it before the first buoy of the swim. She then proceeded to give herself a 2 minute lead coming out of the water. Absolutely phenomenal considering we're only talking about a 250m swim here. She held the gap on the bike, and despite having not run at all in 2023, she managed to hold off the competition well enough and arrived back to transition at exactly the same time as the next team. We were neck and neck...

...but not for very long, because the other competitor had forgotten to put his goggles on. So him and Dave sprinted down to the lake together, but Dave could just dive straight in and take our lead back, whilst the other bloke was faffing with his goggles. Dave absolutely smashed it and had given us a 2 minute lead coming into the final leg.

That didn't mean that I was going to go easy though, I'm not sure I'm capable of that. I kept my wits about me on the swim and held a fast yet manageable pace. When I arrived back into transition, my team mates informed me that the woman chasing me down was the one who, pre-race, had informed us she was trying to go pro - maybe trying to psych out the competition? That was enough information for me to absolutely send it, convinced that she would be closing the gap. But the gap was just too big and running down the hill to the finish, she was nowhere in sight. In reality she was actually still 1min38 behind me, so I could perhaps have taken it a bit steadier, but where's the fun in that?

We crossed the line hand in hand as national champions! As always the highlight of my triathlon calendar! It also turned out that there was decent prize money involved and we'd won £1000 for our triathlon club! Not a bad day out.

Emily Young