The first race is the BRW corporate triathlon where 4500 people join a corporate team and usually the companies pay their expensive entry fee so that they can enjoy themselves doing this event at one of the most picturesque and well known spots in Sydney - Lady Macquaries Chair and the Domain park next to the botanical gardens and near the Sydney Opera House. It's a fairly tame 400m swim, 8km cycle and a 4km run and the standard varies from ex-professionals who do it under 30mins to people doing it well over an hour! This year the swim starts provided the entertainment when some swimmers were in trouble after what must have been the first 50m of the swim. Every year apparently this happens as people in a wave start too fast in the swim (they do waves every 5mins from 7.30am to 11am and everyone has a different swim cap colour)! I did feel sorry for these people since I know how useless a swimmer I use to be but I still could not help myself laughing at another very slow swimmer who proceeded to swim perpendicular to the crowd as if heading to the opera house. Even after a lifeguard on a surf board pointed him in the right direction he soon ended up going the wrong way again!! I should've really been concentrating a bit more myself since I lost about 2mins in transition when I couldn't find my run shoes after the bike leg. I should've been paying more attention to where they should be but when they had become covered with someones towel I was literally running around like a headless chicken trying to find them - I found them after 2mins and headed off to complete the race in 39mins. Next year I'll be back!
The second triathlon I did on April 28th was the Port Stephens NSW triathlon club championships where all the triathlon clubs in NSW send in teams to compete over a course which is half way between the sprint distance (see Kurnell post) and full olympic distance. (We had to do 1km swim, 30km cycle and 8km run). Well to cut a long story short I managed to finish without stopping in this my longest race in just over 2hours 10mins and unlike 98% of people I didn't use a wetsuit so my swim leg was a bit disappointing. The Brats triathlon club put on a fantastic dinner and then at the presentation over the road afterwards it was announced our club finished 2nd place overall. This was a bit disappointing for the club since they I'm sure were expecting a win. However rule changes this year meant that volunteers from clubs could collect points so that afterwards we noticed that the winners picked up 30 points for their volunteers while we picked up none and they won by 8points!! Personally however for me, just competing and meeting/talking/drinking/dancing with other club members outside the training sessions was the important part.
There's definitely room for improvement in my times next year though!
Here's a photo of Spot Anderson our glorious leader who was an ex-professional triathlete and runs the Bondifit triathlon squad shown here in his room after one or two drinks....
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