Dorney Sprint Triathlon, 13 Jul 2025

A bit of a last minute entry (two weeks prior) to the race, as I was getting itchy feet ahead of my A race end of August, and I do like racing Dorney! I chose the Sprint due to the potential for it to be a hot day, and I’m glad I did with 30 degree weather forecast for race day!

I arrived nice and early (around 06:15) with a 07:45 race start and we were quickly informed it would be a non-wetsuit swim; not a problem, I came prepared with my swim skin! Plenty of time to sort out everything for transitions and I was feeling surprisingly chilled for the race. The clouds had also come, which prevented it being insanely hot! My only goals for the race were to go hard from the start (if I blew up on the run at least I gave it a good go) and to try and go faster in my splits than my previous Dorney sprint triathlon, 3 years ago.

We watched the men go off at 07:30 and then we began to be shepherded in to the water at about 07:40. It felt chillier than 24 degrees! I managed to position myself well for the mass start, right near the front, hopefully to miss any of the chaos and avoid getting my head dunked. 07:45 came, we had the countdown and we were off! I managed to start and didn’t get hit or walloped by anyone. I set off fast (ish), again to avoid the chaos and then set into a good rhythm. I could see a few swimmers ahead but couldn’t work out how many. I tried to swim up to them, but couldn’t quite make it, so settled in to my own rhythm. I came out the water at the front of a second-ish sort of group, with maybe 3-5 swimmers ahead, super happy with that! (And over 1 minute faster than the last Dorney swim which was a wetsuit swim!).

A run across for transition, I’m never the fastest, but was proud of how chilled I was, I grabbed my bike (no flying mounts for me) and headed to the bike mount line. Four loops to do and for once there was barely any wind at Dorney, big win! I got straight on to the TT bars and was happy with how much I was able to push, no HR monitor for me today (I tried fixing the battery but it wasn’t connecting), but actually think this was a blessing as I was racing purely on feel. Half way through I had a gel, and continued to push. I did some cat and mouse with one other rider, and think I had two riders overtake me in the bike portion, but we all came into transition together. One of them almost dropped their bike dismounting and I braked hard to avoid any collision, and ran through to rack my bike. Again a bike split faster than last time!

Then onto the run and I felt pretty good, so again I felt I could push. The two I got off the bike with were clearly faster runners than me, so I didn’t even attempt to stay with them. But I was super surprised to overtake somebody, crazy! I set into a lovely rhythm and was amazed at the pace I was able to push. Overtaking some of the men was also super motivating. We got to the half way mark and there was a water station, I’m awful at running and drinking so I took a few walking paces to take on some fluid (necessary due to the heat) and threw the rest over my head. I had tried to work out where I was in the race and estimated about 5th, so continued to plug on. With 2km to go I could see I was gaining on a woman ahead. With 1km to go I was getting even closer, so I picked up the pace. I was almost at her with about 300m to go, but she kicked (I was already at full tilt here), so crossed the line about 20m behind her. But no matter, I had just got a 5km PB by almost 45 seconds! And 3 minutes faster than the last Dorney sprint tri.

As I had seen at least 3 women up the road, I didn’t really look at the results until I got home, so I was gobsmacked to see that I had come 3rd overall and was first in my age group – utter madness! I was delighted – this was the best race I had ever executed!

Thank you Tim for everything over the past few years to see such a huge improvement!

Lottie Lindsley