Tarheijden Triathlon and Belgium Arrival

Leaving early thismorning with the new Fiat already packed for our week in the Belgium Ardennes we headed south to the small village town of Tarheijdan for the next instalment of the European Triathlon adventure. Having not faired so well the Wednesday previous i was hoping for a much better today to get a result on the board and more importantly a little bit of confidence.

Having struggled with my leg I tried to do a little training to try release the tension as well as keep some sanity. I suppose thanks goes to Tynka (my physio). Nearly making me cry on the table, she definitely helped get the ball rolling and back on track; as has been the case for most of the last hockey season. The hourly stretching and rolling and stretching that had become a ritual for the last two weeks and of course Alicia get a mention for putting up with me, I can be a pain in the butt when I cant train for too long.

The race. . . . . . . .

SWIM/T1 - Again tossing up whether or not to wear the wetty was the extent of my stress for the start, Alicia having enough nerves for both of us. The swim was in one of the many canals all over the Netherlands courtesy of the whole below sea level thing. They are actually pretty handy if you’re a triathlon organiser as there is always somewhere to swim. Overall a pretty good swim, getting out of the water with the lead pack of about 6 guys in just under the 7min mark about a minute behind the lead two, yea they were smoking. My transition was ok it was one long rack set up for three different races and would have been about 400m long, the result i started the 20km bike in about 6th.

BIKE/T2 - The two lap bike started off technical going through a few back lane bike paths before getting onto the open road where you could get into a bit of a rhythm. Well that is until you hit the last 400m to find a solid section of cobbles….f’ing cobbles. I definitely missed that memo. I am surprised that my bike is still in one piece. All that was going through my head was thinking of my rims….please don’t break, please don’t break. Trying to reduce the impact I found a soother section creeping along in the gutter. I suppose that is what you get when you race here and at least I only had to ride it twice unlike the 9 times for the long course guys. After the 20km I came into transition about 8th. Being caught by a couple of guys who were pumping the pedals.

RUN – a good quick transition saw me recover a place and within 1km I had run down 5th place. Yes I know the idea of me running people down is unheard of, but it really did happen. With my leg feeling good enough to put a good stride together and being able to see 4th not far ahead I thought to myself if I can catch him then the top 3 is not that far away. I was caught with 400m to go by one guy in the process of running down 4th. For me a happy result taking 5th overall (6th if you include the lady who only ran half a lap of the run....hahahha) and 3rd in my cat (Men 20-40). Again the legs were asking for a lot longer but it’s good to have a hit out and get a reasonable result in a good quality field.

With the race done, part two of today’s journey began driving to Spa for a solid training week in the Belgium Ardennes. While I am looking forward to the week I am a bit worried not having seen anything that even resembles a hill for nearly 6 months. But it will be a good week. Driving down there was some pretty spectacular scenery as we drove through Liege finally arriving at our farm house B&B in Sart-Les-Spa just outside of Spa and greeted by our elderly hosts Mr & Mrs Jose Legras. They are nice and with they’re English and our French on comparable levels the conversation progressed very slowly as we described why we were here and where we were from. Some very interestinginterpretations however the stories of Belgians loving cyclists are all true, as we told them why we were here they’re eyes lit up followed by a million questions, as Alicia put it, it was very cute...haha.