European Sprint Triathlon Championships, 21 Sep 2024
What's the difference between the European and World age group championships? Not much - except the lovely French marshals took a surprisingly laissez-faire approach to safety at times! Other than that, it's still an opportunity for an epic race against some of Europe's best in an exciting new location. What's not to love?
Still a little nervous of putting my bike on a plane, my parents and I took the ferry then drove to Vichy. It's a beautiful town with a gently flowing large river through the centre, but truthfully I spent a lot of time relaxing at our apartment. Given the amount of time I spent training for this, it would be daft to tire myself out being a tourist the day before!
On the day of the race the river got down to 16.9 degrees, enough to take my breath away at the start. There was a bit of arm-pulling on the swim but for the first time I was able to accelerate just enough to get myself some space instead of getting squashed. Once out of the water, I found that flying mounts are vastly more difficult with cold toes, but I somehow made it without hitting the tarmac. The bike course was flat and technical, so once I'd found a group I made sure to be near the front going into any turns. The stereotypical triathlete is bad at cycling and I didn't want to discover how true that might have been!
After a few unsuccessful attempts to escape my group with a friendly Belgian rider we rolled into T2 with a couple of Brits who managed to catch up with us. It's always nice to see [fellow Catenary athlete] Emily but gosh I do wish I could have at least had a head start on the run! Cycling has always been my strongest discipline and I had been pushing the pace, hoping to get myself an advantage ready for the run. The first couple of kilometres of the run felt pretty awful and were way slower than my target pace. The rest of the run was slightly less awful, I rallied a bit but never found anything resembling the speed I was hoping for.
It was a twisty course with plenty of corners to hide people ahead or behind and I made a last ditch attempt to not be overtaken by my fellow Brit running with me just before the end. It turns out I had an entire kilometer to run, but somehow I managed to hold it together.
In the end my result was almost identical to Hamburg World Champs last year which leaves me with mixed feelings - in the intervening time I've taken months out of training to heal a stress fracture, moved to London and made it through a particularly unpleasant period in my new job. I was a touch disappointed with my performance last year and I'd be lying if I said I was entirely happy this year but I've followed Tim's training plan religiously and I couldn't have pushed myself more on the day. We'll have to wait and see what happens in Torremolinos for the age group standard distance World Champs!
Lizzie Fox