Thankfully it was a beautiful morning which meant that my hour and ten minute wait in the queue for registration wasn’t as bad as it could have been. To say that I would have my doubts about the race organiser’s ability to run a bath would be an understatement. What a complete disaster and totally unnecessary……….

Having queued for registration you can imagine my further dismay at having to queue to get into transition to rack. Can this get any worse?

You guessed it – It can…….. Having been advised that the race start times had been put back due to the calamitous registration process I asked the “main man” when wave two would be likely to start. I was advised that wave two athletes should make their way over to the swim start area for a warm up at 9.50am. You can imagine my shock horror when I exited the main building at 9:50 to make my way over to the swim start only to find that most of the wave two athletes were already in the water. I ended up running down the pontoon

trying to fasten my wetsuit whilst getting my rather pretty pink swim cap on. Almost as soon as I had jumped in the water the race started. Not one single stroke of swim warm up –Nightmare.

The swim was a bit “rough” due to the extra testosterone being produced owing to the events championship status. The first buoy which is always the worst in any swim was particularly washing machine like. The swim length measured 768m on my garmin and I spent the first 767 of those meters trying to catch my breath due to my non-existent warm up. Swim time for me was slower than I had hoped for but reasonable none the less.

Having been the recipient of some unwarranted and deeply upsetting ridicule in the past few weeks due to my preference for wearing socks whilst racing, I decided to throw caution to the wind and race without my trusted favourite pair all in the name of shaving a few precious seconds from my time. T1 was going well until an over officious, flag waving, should have gone to spec savers technical official names “Pauline Penalty” (aka Donna McHugh)

penalised me for being 0.000000000000000000001mm out on the mounting line and told me to stop. I swore at her, she swore at me x 10 and she let me on my way.  Whilst in my mind I am convinced that it was the penalty and not my limited athletic prowess that cost me my podium place on the day, I think that it is easier to blame Pauline….. The fact that I was about 10 minutes off the podium is irrelevant as far as I am concerned.

The remainder of the bike was ok and I was relatively pleased with my bike time.  As everyone that knows me will be fed up hearing, I hate running.

The run is a completed chore and I would certainly vote in favour of it being banned as a sport if the opportunity ever arose. The “slog” as I call it was crap from start to finish end of….. The worst part of the run didn’t actually take place during the run. That evening at home, Lewis took great delight upon discovering that a competitor in the 70 plus age group had posted a quicker run time than me, to bombard me with excessive slagging which only added to my run time depression.

Overall and with no thanks to Pauline, I finished in 1:12:52. A slightly quicker time than last year although 12 places further down the pecking order.

There were some fantastic performances from both junior and senior Fusion athletes during the day. Fantastic job guys and well done to you all.

As a “coach” at Fusion (I use the term coach lightly, I hope that you all realise that I deliberately do things like no swim warm up, wear socks and get T1 penalties to show the kids what NOT to do. I like to think of it as taking one for the team……