Great weekend! I found the clinics very useful – good to have a friendly, open environment to be able to ask basic questions and learn from the mountain of collective wisdom. A few of us ended up swimming to the start of the ‘Escape from Saigon’ swim too so double the open water practice!
In terms of lessons learned – I was so worried about getting swum over that I ended up swimming a very wide route (according to my watch I swam about 1900m, instead of 1500) so I definitely need to work on better sighting, confidence around other swimmers, and confidence in open water more generally. I had a few sections where I felt like I was in a better rhythm, but for the most part I found it quite hard to get relaxed, and focus on good technique. So I plan to build in some more open water events, and keep building strength and technique in the pool.
My T1 was quite slow, so room for improvement there, T2 was better.
Bike went ok – it was quite wet so I was taking it very steady on the twistier sections, and trying to keep consistent cadence and rhythm.
Run felt really good – felt like I got into a good rhythm early on, negative split all but one mile, and finished feeling strong, so that was really encouraging. I’m working on increasing my cadence (especially after Coach AJ’s talk!) and had 173 average for the run, so making progress there, but room for further improvement. Only negative was really finding the Gu gels I’m using for the run section quite sickly, so still trial and error for what’s going to work nutrition-wise in both bike and run phases (bike I’m currently trying Tailwind/water alternate and non-sweet solid foods, but not found the perfect combination for either leg yet).
