Coached Athlete Review… A European and World Championships at the end of the season, Heather had a long build up to her ‘A’ races but kicked off 2024 with a Triathlon Training Camp with us in Mallorca and then tried to race every month over the summer, even with cancelled events we made sure to keep her busy! Read how Heather’s season panned out…
The highlights of the year were right at the end of the season Standard distance ETU championships in Vichy in September and ITU championships in Torremolinos in October. I’d qualified 15 months before so it felt like a long run to the events. Really enjoyed both events, a great experience and good to go out knowing I’d see fellow athletes from Challenge TriCamp at the events.
Kicked of the season with Challenge Tri Camp out in Mallorca, good company, good food, loads of swim, bike and run coached sessions in the sunshine. Then on to planning the events I wanted to do for the rest of the season.
Things stared well with a the Chilterns Valley Winery and Brewery Sportive in June – apparently I am getting a reputation for picking Sportives that begin and end at a brewery – not my fault if the organisers of sportives think this is a good selling point. Next up was a 3.8k swim in Cardiff Bay held the day before the Cardiff Tri. Turned out to be a good location to swim I was pleased to see my swim time had improved loads since doing an Iron Man back in 2017.
Then things started to go a bit down hill. In July the ‘one on the river’, sprint distance Tri turned into the one by the river duathlon when the water quality in the Thames took a turn for the worst. Despite this my first duathlon went surprising well.
Then on to the Birmingham Sprint Tri in Sutton Park. All started ok with a good swim in clean water then onto the bike, where my chain broke, another athlete kindly stopped and lent me chain tool and I repaired the chain only for it to go again 200m further on. Thankfully only a short distance from transition. Decided I’d do the run anyway, so dropped off my bike and found what was hopefully the right yellow bag to return the chain tool before setting off for nice off road run through the park. Somewhat annoying was my bike was booked in for a service three days later – argh!
It was about this point the standard distance event I had booked for the end of August got cancelled. This was followed by another cancellation when Conquer the Chilterns got cancelled last minute due to, you guessed it, water quality in the Thames. Brent put several race simulations in my training plan so not all was lost 😀. I was very relieved that the Thunderstorms forecast for race day in Vichy did not materialise, though this led to a nervous couple of days leading up to the event, thankfully though raining all went well.
Next year’s plan so far will involve mountains, I’m thinking the Snowman Triathlon in North Wales and Helvellyn Triathlon in the Lake District. Oh – and learning to swim with a four beat kick!
