Statto

Warning: quite a boring post for anyone who isn't me.

The official race results are in.  Let's do some analysis.  The positions in brackets are the position for that section alone, whereas the cumulative number gives the actual position in the race at the end of that section i.e. I was the 57th fastest person in T1, and therefore in that time dropped from 53rd to 60th place.

Swim - 14:30 (53rd of 72, cumulative 53rd) - not unexpectedly, a long way down the pack.  But the time is quite remarkable.  Clearly the swim course was shorter than advertised, perhaps by as much as 25%.  For example, if I were to do 14:30 last year, I would have been 4th out the water.

T1 - 2:54 (57th, cumulative 60th) - Oh dear, clearly I have some work to do on transition.  It felt relatively smooth, and the wetsuit came off fairly quickly, but in hindsight there were some things I could have done without.  Putting socks on, whilst feeling dizzy and exhausted from the swim, was a challenge. Better racers would not bother with socks, but having not done it before, I didn't want to try it for the first time on race day. In addition, getting the cycle top on was a little tricky.  The zip is the wrong way round (the slider is on the right), so it's a bit fiddly. In addition to this, I stupidly placed my transition crate underneath the bike.  It fits nicely, when the bike is hung on the rack, but when you have to get it out and get the saddle under the rail, it's in the way.  Lessons learned.

Bike - 40:52 (26th, cumulative 39th) - Woohoo!  Although the bike felt a little slow at the time, clearly it wasn't a bad effort at all, almost in the top third of the field.  That's backed up by the Garmin stats, which show an average speed of 19.3mph.  I made up 21 places (only exceeded by one other person), although bear in mind that the men and women, whilst combined in results, raced separately, so I actually only overtook 7 or 8 on the road.  Still think I could have gone a bit quicker though.

T2 - 1:48 (64th, cumulative 40th) - That transition again. I made the schoolboy error of leaving the laces tied on my trainers, which meant I spent a good 20-30 seconds trying to get them undone. D'oh!  The transition crate also got in the way once more, trying to re-rack the bike.

Run - 24:53 (55th, cumulative 42nd) - A little disappointing, but probably a minute of that is attributable to a call of nature.  In hindsight, I could have pushed harder (running, not weeing), but was nervous of going to fast too soon.

So, 42nd out of 72, 60th percentile.  It's certainly above my target of not being in the bottom 10%, so I think we can consider it job done.