Galway 70.3

After a few crap races and I finally had a race I feel happy with!

I did Galway 70.3 at the weekend and apart from the nasty weather I really enjoyed myself. We arrived on Friday evening and checked out the sea conditions and the water was lovely and calm. Back there again on Saturday morning to do a little bike and run and the sea was still lovely and calm. I did my pre-race session and pleased that my legs were feeling good. We'd been out on the Friday and driven the bike course - looked ok. Not as hilly as I expected (or hoped) but undulating. Road surface could have been better though!

Morning of the race and I was up bright and early (whilst it was still dark) and down to transition to make sure everything was in place. Everything fine with my bike but the sea was completely different to how it had been for the 2 days before! It was no longer calm - there were now massive waves and it was looking a bit scary!

In the end the race was delayed by an hour and the swim course was cut from 1.9k down to 1k. I was slightly relieved about a shorter swim (swimming isn't my strongest part of a triathlon) but also a bit gutted as I would rather it was the full distance.

10 mins before the start we were lined up on the beach with our ankles in the water (which was actually surprisingly warm)! Then we were off running into the water! The waves were huge and it was really hard work. We had to swim out to a turnaround buoy before turning back to head toward a beach further along. It seemed to take forever to get to the turn buoy and I'm sure it wasn't that far out! I actually had a really good swim and felt like I attacked it well and didn't get phased by swimming in such bad conditions.

T1 was sooo long and I really hate running in bare feet. I have such sensitive feet and it hurts so much! Put on lots of gear for the bike (jacket, gloves etc - I've learnt since the Bala disaster)! I enjoyed the bike and worked really hard, probably a bit too hard for the first half but needed to after not working hard enough at my previous middle distance races. About 20k from home I went through a bit of a bad patch which coincided with an absolute down pour of really hard rain and nasty lumpy road! Luckily my bad patch didn't last too long and I managed to get back into it again.

T2 was equally as painful on my feet. I then had some problems trying to find my transition bag!

Then onto the run. A bit of an average run for me. To start with I had really bad back pain for about 5k. I kept my HR in check but feel I probably should have gone a bit quicker. Its difficult at the time to know if you can though!

Finished 2nd in my age group and 5th age grouper over all, so all in all happy with my result. Definitely more my sort of course than Antwerp.