Welsh Sprint Champs

Tuska 15th July

Report by Les Watson

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in keeping close tabs on the Met Office weather forecast for the Tuska event given the recent spate of incessant, torrential stair rods we’ve been seeing. It was rather a moving target in the preceding week with things changing by the day but, great news, the forecast just 24 hours before:

0600    -           a fluffy white one with orange glow creeping out behind

0900    -           fluffy white one

1200    -           floppy black one with two great blobs of wet beneath

Magic! Race start 07:25, race finish 09:00 (even me) so it’ll be good whilst we’re competing. Wrong!! Met Office must get their advice from Len Bateman! It peed and peed and peed.

So having parked a mile away from transition Jake and I had the bright idea of donning wetsuits at the car to keep dry and taking just our race gear. How smart. On entering transition it soon became apparent that to set up meant leaving ones runners in the box and that meant walking around for 40 minutes bare footed in the cold, wet, wet rain. Duhhh. Ok Jake I’ll go and get the daps (and mac as it happened) and we’ll lob them under Jim’s tent when race starts (thanks Jim….doesn’t that make it feel worthwhile turning up……or was the major sale of a pair of lock laces enough?).

We saw everyone before the start, Patrick taking a spin with his ‘go faster’ helmet on, Oggie sitting in his car to keep warm (exactly what time did you arrive to get a space that close to transition??), Dave looking confident, Alex and Ian setting up and chatting to Rhodri, and Ollie looking even more confident than Dave.

So on to the slipway for the start. “Oh no” says my ‘little’ juvenile “this is like proper ocean swimming, it’s going to be horrible”. Not a good time to have second thoughts so in we went and I sent Jake in search of the front somewhere whilst I wallowed with the other whales at the back. Hooter sounds and we’re off. What a melee. I struggle to swim in a straight line but there were some there that must have swum an Olympic distance.

Ollie had a good swim exiting with the second fastest split. Rumour has it this should have been the fastest as the number 1 rank allegedly took a ‘short cut’ coming in to the slip. Jake also had a good splash; was that Oggie climbing out alongside him? A shout of “Hey chicken boy” from his fellow competitor confirmed that it was (it’s the legs for those not spotting the obvious). Needless to say everyone was long gone when I finally reached terra firma, just as well as my T1 was worthy of Jake fame, I’m glad master cameraman Todd was absent.

The bike legs went largely to form with two exceptions, sadly Alex pulled up 10minutes in feeling none too great and, somehow, chicken boy was faster than his dad!

I saw Ian as we both went into T2, then out on the run I passed Ollie about half km into it…….he was of course going in the homeward direction and finished in a great 3rd place. I didn’t see anyone else until the finish but Oggie ran well to finish 11th and Dave worked his way through to 18th. Patrick decided to take a swallow dive off some precipice on the coast path run grazing and bruising his knee (at least your chain stayed on the bike Patrick) but still managed to finish 28th. Jake obviously had a faulty timing chip as he took another 50secs out of me on the run (and I tried really hard) finishing in 42nd. I followed up in 79th with Ian a couple of mins behind in 103rd. Rhodri did well with a 34th place.

Well done to everyone for competing in such vile conditions. It could have been worse, might have been blowing a hoolie as well, you would never have held on to that tent then Jim. I hope you paid Eleri well for helping, she was soaked big time!

Full race results can be found at:

http://www.pencoedtri.org/showthread.php?t=222