Sunday 15th April 2007
400m pool swim, 20k bike, 5k run.
Race Report by Richard Sheldrake
I chose to enter this race (held at Warwick school) as an early season test of my fitness and to get back into the groove of racing (my last race being Cambridge last August). £38 seemed a bit steep for a sprint distance race (when for example Grantham is £27) but the date suited me.
The weather forecast was for mist early on burning off to leave a hot, sunny day. Luckily the mist had gone by the time the first competitors left T1 onto the bike course.
For some reason when entering the race electronically, the site only allowed for whole minutes to be entered so conservatively I stuck down 8 minutes rather than 7 (7.30 would have been my ideal choice!)
On arriving at poolside, my lane’s length counter admitted to me that she had already miscounted several competitors. This didn’t fill me with confidence in that she only ever had four competitors in her lane at any one time, we all had different colour swim hats on and she only had to count to 16. She counted mine correctly and I exited in exactly 7.30. My T1 was slightly longer than necessary due to running past my bike. School boy error!
The bike course was described as undulating but fast. This was undoubtedly true but unfortunately it was almost exclusively on busy A roads and therefore meant a lot of traffic swishing by (cars and vans not fellow competitors before you ask!). It was more or less a straight out and back with a minor detour on the return. Coming back into Warwick involved a left turn at a roundabout near a retail park with queues of traffic necessitating a bit of weaving (marshalls didn’t seem to mind!) before we had to bounce up onto the pavement to avoid some temporary traffic lights for roadworks (race directors instructions - honest!). My bike split was 35.02.
The run was two laps of the school playing fields and paths/pavements surrounding the school. This was fast, flat, dry ground. I duly finished in 21minutes for a total time of 1.05.38 and position of 51st out of 192 finishers.
The fun and games started after the event when it took the organisers 6 days to post the results on their website and to my dismay mine was not amongst them. Numerous phonecalls and emails to Ian Lole the race director and Trafeco finally yielded my results on 15th May exactly a month after the event. Either I was unlucky or between them Trafeco and the timing company made a hash of things – you decide!
Overall, a decent early season race but expensive and not the best organised.