It was about now that the nerves started to kick in, and this was made worse by having to walk 1km around the side of the lake to the starting point in just swimming trunks.
Signing up early for the event meant bagging a place in the second group of swimmers to start. After horrifying those around me by spitting into my goggles to prevent fogging (is this a British-only phenomenon?) I found a position near the front confident of being one of the fastest.
How wrong that assumption was.
Just seconds after diving in, the sheer volume of writhing, kicking bodies became overwhelming. One cheeky young scamp practically swam right over me, and several kicks to the legs and ribs later, the outside of the pack seemed the best place, as it ensured a clear, bruise-free path.
The combination of stragglers from the first group and the odd faster swimmer coming from behind made it difficult to swim crawl, which meant switching between breaststroke and crawl to stay on course. But the rest of the swim was navigated without much trouble and I finished the stage in good time.
The changeover to the bike stage went smoothly as the powerful sun had done the trick in the run back to the transition area and saved me the trouble of having to slip the cycling gear on while wet.
As expected, the bike stage went well, but the really long, hot and murderously steep climb shortly after the 20km mark was the worst preparation possible for what was always going to be my worst leg — the run.
In the miniscule amount of reading done before the race, I’d seen something about a phenomenon called “jelly legs,” the sensation one supposedly gets during the run after being on the bike for a long time.
This had not cropped up during training, but shortly after starting the run, the old legs began to feel like they would soon collapse from underneath me. The cobblestone path climb from the transition area to the lakeside road didn’t make matters any better, but determined not to stop, I gritted my teeth and on went the running, even though it felt like I was going no faster than a leisurely walk.
The rest of the run went by in a heat-induced blur before the finish line eventually came into sight. Crossing the line in 1 hour, 51 minutes and 36 seconds, just six minutes outside my target time, I sat down for a well-deserved rest.
It was a very rewarding experience and the sense of achievement attained just by finishing made it all worthwhile. This feeling was compounded when a couple of days later a colleague informed me I had finished 23rd in the “society” category and 57th overall out of the more than 1,000 people to start the race.
The one complaint about the whole day was that the race could have started earlier, because at 8am the summer sun was already high in the sky and the heat was intense. Besides, it’s not as if the kind of people who do triathlons for fun have trouble getting up early.
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