This Olympic distance triathlon in Germany signifies the start of the German season and attracts many big names and is a great competitive race!! I decided to race this as it fit perfectly into my preparation for Austria 70.3 2 weeks later.

We travelled over to the race by car, 3 athletes, 3 bikes and my wife (driver) in one car for 15 hours drive, lots of fun!!! If there were a car packing world champs I would surely be in with a shout!!

RACE DAY

A nice sunny day was very welcome for race day and a lie in also as the race was a 2.30 afternoon start!! The swim was 1000m taking place in a 50m outdoor pool 8 to a lane and the usual fun during the first 100m, after the craziness ended and we all found our position the swim was a nice easy cruise on feet just getting ready for the bike, judging from the disks on display this was going to be a fast ride!! My plan was to hit the bike very hard for the first 10k to try and get away from a lot of the Olympic distance itu specialists, this was going nicely to plan until 5k into the race when I received a penalty, for what I have no idea, maybe drafting or blocking but was a 2 minute penalty added to time at end of race, for a race of this distance that pretty much ended the competition for me. I was very angry at the time and took quite a while to calm down and get my head back in the race.

While finding out what the penalty was and if I had to stop the real race flew past!! Sebastian Keinle from Germany came flying through on the bike posting a 52 minute bike split and enjoying a nice lead off the bike, was a very impressive bike display!! I got back into race and was riding just off the back of the main group, 2 mins down on Sebastian and 60 down on Andreas Raelart and his younger brother Michael. I tried on 2 occasions to ride away from group but never got much of a lead and always they pushed harder to catch me, so I just sat in for the last 10k and waited to get a good run session in to get something out of the weekend!!

Run was solid, very hard hilly twisty course, ran hard but did not have the energy to go really deep on this day and crossed the line 8th place after a nice little sprint finish to hold off one charging athlete!! Crossed the line in 1hr 44 for the 1k/ 40k/ 10k , nice and fast and sure a good workout ahead of Austria. Have to say I was very angry at the end of the race with the penalty but soon calmed down when talking with Szilvi and greeting my friends at the finish line!!! There will be bigger days to show what I can do!!

FUN ON THE WAY HOME

So the nest day was another 15 hour drive home, not nice at all with stiff legs from the race and tiredness has been high all week as a result! We did have fun on the way home though as we got stopped by the police, they were stopping every eastern European car it seemed!! The police were very friendly though, a big change from the police in Hungary, just as we were given the all clear another car pulled up behind and the winner of a Major marathon race in Germany that we had watched on TV the previous morning got out, those guys are super skinny!!!

Back to training now and all focus on AUSTRIA 70.3!!!