Blaenavon Tri - 11 May 2008

Report by Alex Ilyat

This was the 25th and possibly the last Blaenavon Tri, which I have to say is a real shame. I think Blaenavon has gained a reputation as being one of the toughest tri’s in the UK, for 2 reasons:

1. Every time I said I was doing the Blaenavon tri people remarked – “oh, that’s hilly isn’t it?”

2. Bearing in mind that the distances are 800m/45km/12ish km the winning times are generally 2hrs 40min+

However I think it ranks as one of my favourite races of all time; the organisation may not have been run like a military operation, and yes the course was tough but the scenery was fantastic and there was a great social atmosphere about the race.

The race didn’t start until 10am, very civilised. Ian and I arrived at 9am and registration hadn’t even been setup. It didn’t take long to register the 30 or so competitors, the majority of which were men and looked like seasoned triathletes.

The swim was in the pool. Ian was helping to lane count and offer some last minute advice to a novice triathlete who didn’t know what to do with his race number and was shaking like a leaf. The swim was straight forward enough, and I had a PB for the swim split!

Transition was small but perfectly formed, not as bad as the race info made it sound although the flight of stairs was not ideal. The sun was scorching and the warm breeze felt good over my freshly shaven legs! Bring back sunny races. The first few miles of the bike was flat, I had beaten a couple of people out of transition and left them well and truly behind, unfortunately because of the small field of competitors I don’t think I had the chance to over take any serious competition for the rest of the race. The bike leg had two massive long climbs along some very narrow country lanes. I had already decided that the best way to tackle them was to sit back and spin up – this was still hard work, believe me. The cattle grids presented an extra obstacle, the bars were really wide and wooden boards had been placed over like bridges but had snapped in places. I decided that the best thing to do was to get off and walk over them – and that was still tough. After all this there were a few down hill bits, mostly narrow hairpins but you could get a bit of speed in places. Then it was onto the home straight (and flat) back to Pontypool leisure centre. It had taken just over 2 hours to complete the 45km course.

P.S. The marshals were fantastic! They stopped all the traffic and waved us through – brilliant.

The run was only 12km but the race info said that it had taken a county standard runner 41mins to complete. Great. The first couple of miles was along a canal tow path – shady and flat, then came the first climb. It was here that I caught up with the novice from the pool (he was in the first wave) he was walking up the hill. “come on only 3miles to go!” I shouted (ok there was probably about 4 and still another hill) but he started running again. After a short flat section came the last hill of the day, up to a tower. Then it was downhill all the way to the finish, including a few styles, gates and a really steep decent through the forest. The best bit was running the last 500m through a field of bluebells to the finish. The run had taken me just under an hour to complete.

I finished in a time of 3hrs, 16mins and 57secs, in 12th position. The winner finished 33mins ahead of me but I was quite happy with getting round in less than 3 ½ hours. I hope they find someone to organise the race for next year as I would love to give it another go.