Marlow Classic Triathlon 2019

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The Marlow Classic Triathlon takes full advantage of it location; Marlow is a beautiful market town with the swim leg taking place in the slow moving Thames, transition in a Green Flag Park, the ride out towards Henley and across the Chilterns and the run along the Thames path, it’s got a lot going for it.

I was enjoying a sprint distance today, but there was a full schedule offering Half and Olympic distances, and Aquabike options as well.

I know a lot of people are nervous about swimming in the Thames, but I love it. Ok, you can’t see a lot, and it tastes terrible, but it’s not often that isn’t the case for an OW swim. For this race, the swim started upstream, rounded a buoy and shot downstream, then rounded a final buoy for a short upstream leg – I saw several swimmers who hadn’t paid attention to the briefing and as a result tried to miss out the final leg. I was glad to see them herded away from the finish.

The river is wide and slow moving here, so you have plenty of room to stretch out widthways and the current doesn’t seem to make a massive difference to the pace (my Garmin never seems to track this swim with any accuracy so I can’t be more precise that that). Like a lot of the river based events, entry/exit is at a boat mooring so you need to be careful of the healthy drop into relatively shallow water with a seated entry, and a carpet and willing marshals help with the exit.

There’s then a short, slightly uphill run into transition, grab the bike and a long run across the park, a car park then mounting on the access road (about 350m in total)

I really like the ride – a short stretch through residential housing then a left turn onto the (reasonably quiet) Marlow Henley road with a significant hill directly in front of you. Conquer the hill and its a more or less straight, slightly undulating ride along this road through leafy countryside and fields. There’s a single mini roundabout to be negotiated before the turnaround point as you charge into Henley then spin around a final roundabout and race back along the same route, facing the same climb with about 1.5k to run.

The ride is long – about 24km with nearly 200m of climb, but the out and back nature means you can get a feel for how you are doing as other riders pass you going the other way. Despite the two climbs, it’s fast, and there always seems to be enough straight sections for cars to get past without being held up unduly. Horseboxes are a different matter, but I was lucky today and only had a few cars come past on the whole route.

Back into Marlow, another run across the park to get back into T2 and what can only really be described as a pleasant riverside run is all that stands in the way of your finish. With almost half down the towpath, before curving away and up slightly, and finishing the run with the final kilometre or so along the same path as the bike route you know exactly what you have to deliver and can pace yourself effectively in for the finish even if you’ve never raced here before. There are two water stations, one right at the transition exit and one around three quarters of a kilometre from the finish.

There were plenty of marshals and they were all supportive and engaged; anyone covering the half iron distance is going to see them a fair few times. I also believe I saw bike mounted medics on the run course which seemed like a sensible idea.

The path into the finish gantry isn’t amazingly clear as there’s a lot of crossing over taking part, but there were marshals yelling to make sure you knew where to go before grabbing an attractive medal and a handful of post race nutrition.

I like F3 events – the people involved seem to be caring and passionate, but I’ve mentioned before that they take some stick for organisation (or lack of) locally. I’ve never been directly impacted before, but given that this is a location they use several times a year there were some interesting observations i saw this time.

  • It looked like anyone that had booked through one of the ticketing agencies wasn’t on the competitor lists slowing down registration and causing athlete angst.
  • Although bikes were being carefully inspected at the ‘swim in’ entrance to transition, people were coming in and out of the ‘bike in/out’ entrance that was unmonitored for a good chunk of the morning.
  • No one was supervising the free racking and as space rapidly ran out, I saw lots of bikes and kit being moved by competitors desperate for a slot, which would have made me livid if I hadn’t been stood there guarding my stuff.
  • There was some confusion about the timings, which I gather had moved around a bit, but I think they started a half iron distance swim thirty minutes before your sprint wave? This pretty much guarantees the bulk of the half iron distance athletes are going to be exiting the water and trying to cross the narrow bridge to transition at the exact time you want to drop the next lot in the water.
  • Bike out was on the left hand side of the exit, and bike in (coming the other way) was also on the left, keeping the flow of competitors separated. As we left T1 we naturally stayed on the left, mounted and rode onto the left hand side of the road safely. I was then stunned coming back in after the ride to be told by the marshalls that I had to cross the road and the flow of outgoing riders to dismount on the right, then cross the flow again after a short run to be able to enter Bike in. None of this had been mentioned in the briefing and made no sense at all. It was carnage.
  • I actually found my Mum (in her seventies, carrying a handbag) in transition after I finished my race – to be fair she was jumped on fairly quickly by a marshall but she should never have got in there.

I’ve cut them a lot of slack in the past but I really think f3 ought to be be able to nail this. Its just that final 10% that they need to learn from each event and correct. If you can live with organisation only being 90% there, go for it, as this is a beautiful race to complete and there’s plenty for any friends and family to do while you are out there.