Part 5: Transition 1 and 2
Reading, September 2016 10:17 am
I raced up and over the railway bridge, using the speed the downhill gave me to swing around two left hand turns in quick succession and then unclipped my left-hand pedal well before the dismount line, making sure there would be no embarrassing topple off of the bike at slow speed. As I stopped at the line I could hear at least another two cyclists squealing to a halt alongside and behind me – there was no let-up if I wanted to keep them behind me. Taking hold of my bike, I ran for my space back in the transition area.
As soon as I started trying to use the muscles that running activates rather than the big ones used for cycling, my thighs screamed at me that they’d both been shot. This seemed unlikely, so I ignored them, and I kept going; knowing it wasn’t far to go.
I found my space, slung my bike on the rack (all precision and care forgotten at this point) and wrestled off my bike shoes one at a time, slipping on my run shoes, having to kneel and tie each lace. There were still quite a few gaps in the bikes racked, so I knew there were some riders still out on the course. Having learnt from the number belt incident I was careful not to forget to remove my helmet and swung my number around to my front.
This was a much less complicated transition than the first one, and I managed to do it all and in the right order, but it was unpleasant to realise that in T1 I’d flung my wetsuit on top of my run shoes so not only did I lose a second or two moving it, my shoes were absolutely full of lake water. I grabbed a quick swig from my water bottle and squelched out onto the run course.
Windsor, June 2016 7:44 am
Coughing and spluttering, I clawed my way back to the surface, spitting out a lot of Thames river water as I surfaced. I know I’d implied earlier that Reading was my first triathlon, but technically it wasn’t – Reading was my first solo event, but I’d agreed to take part in a Triathlon relay team 12 weeks earlier at Windsor with Stu and Barney. I’d signed us up with the team name ‘The Stu/Barney Sandwich’ without discussing it with either of the others, after some initial contemplation they’d both warmed to it.
Picking your team name is one of the gentler joys of a relay triathlon and something I probably should have shared.
This was Olympic distance (twice as far as a sprint) but I only had to worry about the swim – surely a doddle – before handing off to another member of the team which meant we didn’t have to worry about transitions or any of the other multi discipline complications. I was just going for a long swim.
I’d started sensibly, at the back and was trying to make sure I maintained a steady pace. What I hadn’t realised was that the next wave was starting ten minutes after us, and with 1500m to swim it wasn’t that long before the fastest swimmers caught us up. In particular, I had been deeply and unpleasantly surprised as one individual swum straight over the top of me.
I continued to glare at his stupid green hat which was pretty much all I’d seen rapidly receding and wished I’d managed to poke him hard with an elbow as he’d come through rather than an understandable focus that was entirely on not drowning.
Things had gone badly from agreeing to sign up. When I dragged myself to my first training session at the local pool, I was dismayed to discover that I’d mentally overstated my own fitness – expecting to bang out 1500m in short order and then head off for a well-deserved breakfast it came as a shock to find myself clinging to the side and gasping for breath after two lengths. I consoled myself by telling myself that at least the Olympic rowing lakes at Eton Dorney was a hospitable open water swimming location that I was looking forward to experiencing and settled down to trying to build my fitness. It was weeks later, when the competitor pack came through that I realised the swim was not in fact at Dorney as I’d assumed, but in the Thames.
I’ll confess to several moments of panic – not only had I read many stories of swimmers getting sick, but I realised I had no idea if it was downstream or upstream – I knew this would make a huge difference – or anything about the mechanics of swimming in a river, which was something I’d never done before. As I quickly skimmed the rest of the pack, I saw the swim was two thirds downstream and a third upstream – but this still didn’t help as I had no idea how fast the current would run, or how fast I was actually swimming – I could see that if I was slow enough I could wind up swimming miles as I fought my way back upstream!
It got worse as we arrived at the event at an ungodly hour in the morning. Barney, our cyclist had had to register and rack his bike the day before and had warned us there was a ‘bit of a run’ between the swim out and the transition area – it turned out to be flipping miles (well, 500m at least). It might not sound like a lot, but I hadn’t run for years, I was going to be barefoot – the path was strewn with twigs and small pointy stones – and I was sure I had very delicate and sensitive feet! I was not ludicrously unhappy, and selflessly made sure everyone knew it with a loud and significant hissy fit. At the root of things, however, I just didn’t want to let the team down, and now felt that the odds were stacking up unpleasantly against me.
Back in the river, I was continuing to fight my way through the swim – and it was a fight. I was gasping and having to sit up every hundred meters or so to do a few breaths of breaststroke as I tried to get enough air in to fuel my body and this meant a big batch of swimmers from the rest of the wave behind were constantly gaining. There was an older gentleman slightly behind and to my left who had been doing breaststroke the whole way; I refused to let myself let him beat me.
As we approached the turn at two thirds distance, I dived from the middle of the river where the flow is fastest (to maximise my downstream current assistance) to the bank where the current is significantly slower (to minimise the drag as I swam upstream) and although a few swimmers came past I managed to exit before the bulk of the next wave. I did still have to fend off two more swimmers who tried to occupy the part of the river I was already in in an attempted aquatic blitzkrieg but knowing what was coming made it easier.
Not only did I beat the breaststroker (which was a massive win in itself) but I did manage to painfully overhaul some other swimmers who by the looks of it had only had their ‘Jesus, swimming is harder than I remember’ epiphany as they rounded the turnaround buoy rather than like me, in training. Dragging myself out of the water via two big steps built on scaffolding I took off towards the transition area.
I made it no more than thirty meters before, suffocating, I had to stop and undo my wetsuit – all the athletes coming past were already stripped to the waist and were actually able to breath while running. I’d though optimistically I might be able to make it to transition without needing to undo the top half. I could see Barney waiting anxiously in the transition area, as he was only 50m or so away from me – but I still had to run several hundred meters directly away to the entrance to the transition area, then run all the way back to hand over our timing chip.
Knowing I was holding things up and letting the team down, I lurched back into motion. We’d cunningly racked right by the giant tree in the middle of transition, which was hard to miss and made it easy to run to our spot. By the time I staggered up to Barney I couldn’t breathe, had huge black spots in my vision and couldn’t strictly adhere to the rules by bending down, taking off my chip and handing it to him. On the positive side, I hadn’t noticed feet being impaled by anything as I ran, so maybe my assumption of sensitive feet was unfounded.
As I held onto the transition racking for dear life Barney removed the chip from my ankle like a mum putting a shoe on a recalcitrant toddler. I don’t think I even noticed Barney going as I furiously worked to try to suck my lungs back in through my nose before I passed out; I knew one thing for a fact. I was never, ever, ever going to do this again.
Two weeks later we’d already signed up for next year’s Windsor Tri and an end of season HSBC Tri at Eton Dorney (I was determined to swim that lake) as the same relay team, and somehow, I’d been talked into signing up for a solo triathlon at Reading in September.
Transition One/Two
We talked earlier about all the setting up that is important when you first find your spot in the Transition area and suggested that you may want to practice the transition before the event. Let’s walk through the process so we can see what’s typically involved. Some of this will be personal, so consider this an example rather than a set of instructions.
As I’m still staggering out of knee high water I’ll reach up with my left hand and yank my swim hat and goggles off my head. They are going to restrict my ability to spot the bike and put my helmet on, so they need to be gone. With my right hand I reach behind me and grab the long ribbon on the zipper on my wetsuit, pulling it down and reaching back up to release the Velcro at the top.
This is critical to get done early as however hard you may find breathing while swimming in a wetsuit to be, running is a significant step worse. By the time I’m five meters out of the water ideally I will have pulled my arms out of the top of the wetsuit and I can break into a comfortable run. As part of this manoeuvre I let go of the goggles and hat as my hand is half way out of the sleeve – so far, the sleeve has then always kept the goggles in place until I’m ready to sort everything out when the triathlon is finished.
As I run into transition (always remembering the route to my space that I picked out earlier) I’ll push the wetsuit down as far as I can on my hips, to speed things up later.
When I get back to the bike, I push the now below waist high wetsuit down as far as I can then stamp on alternating sides with my feet to get it off. As soon as it’s off I place the wetsuit in my transition space, taking care not to soak any jumper I may have in my transition bag or shoes I may have laid out – if you throw it over the transition rack make sure it’s not hanging over (and dripping into) anything important; it probably will be, so chucking it on the floor underneath the bike is your best bet.
Try and be fairly neat and tidy with the stuff you are removing – it might take a second or so longer but could save a lot more than that later as you come back to T2.
Wetsuit free, I grab the helmet first – it’s always the first thing I do and means I don’t risk a disqualification by touching the bike first. Helmet on, I may grab sunglasses if it’s bright. I grab the transition rail and slide my feet into the cycling shoes (as I mentioned earlier, I have tested and confirmed that I can complete a sprint triathlon sock free and it saves a load of time).
You may want to swill some water around your mouth to get rid of the taste of lake, river or salt. I’ve yet to find one that tastes nice, but I can recommend a few that are remarkably horrible.
These days I wear my number belt under the suit, so I don’t have to worry about that – I can grab the bike and run for the mount line.
To give you a feel for the difference that can be had here – for the 2016 Reading tri T1 took me 3:12 from exiting the water to crossing the mount line. Even with what was a relatively slow time, I still made up 38 positions on where I was when I exited the swim. A year later, at the same event I was able to complete the same T1 in 1:19 (See, no socks!). Disappointingly, I only (only!) made up 34 places, because I’d completed the swim a lot faster and was facing some more hard-core triathletes. Putting that to one side, you can see that just knowing what I was doing helped me trim nearly two minutes off my time in this area alone, and I’m moving in front of a bunch of people who did a faster swim than me, pretty much for free.
Crushingly, the event winner in 2017 completed T1 in 32s. I still can’t work out how that’s possible (I kind of do – this is why they put the shoes on the bikes with elastic bands; I’d still look a proper idiot if I tried it given my overall times but this probably won’t stop me trying it out at some point). 32 seconds is still ridiculously quick to get out of the water, run to your bike shucking a wetsuit, putting on a helmet and covering a good couple of hundred meters to get to the mount line).
Sometime later, you will hit the transition area for the second time. T2 is usually a lot simpler. Dismount, run in, rack the bike, remove the helmet (after racking the bike) and if you are wearing bike specific shoes, change them before swinging your race number to the front. This is where the elastic laces come in useful, enabling you to pull the shoe on and just go.
After what may well be more than an hour of physical activity this is also a good time to potentially grab a drink and maybe some form of nutrition – an energy gel if you are feeling swanky, something full of sugar if you don’t. The main reason why a lot of triathletes use gels is that you can almost inhale them – it’s certainly quicker to eat one than a mars bar. The first time I tried to eat a handful of jelly babies on a run leg I nearly choked to death. When you are ready for the final leg, head out to the Run Out
Again, looking at my time for T2 in 2016 I took a whole 2:45 to complete the above few simple steps. I was pretty tired at this point and it was showing. A year later, I was out on the run in 1:13 (I still lost three places in even that short a time). In total, I was able to improve my times for exactly the same transitions by nearly 3:30 – imagine how tough that would be to take out of the swim, the bike or the run?
It’s worth practicing T1 and T2 a few times before the race to make sure you benefit from these hugely improved transition times, or at least a chunk of it. You just need to give yourself a chance to think through what you need to do and in what order while you build some muscle memory of where to look for things in order to help out when your brain is a bit fuzzed by the sugar shortage caused by all the work it’s been doing. We’ll also talk a little bit more about brick sessions shortly, which are another thing you can do to ease transitions.
Key Points:
– Start removing your wetsuit, goggles and hat as soon as you leave the water
– Always Helmet first
– You may get cold on the ride – have appropriate clothing
– Try not to drop your wetsuit on dry clothing
– Take your time but work as efficiently as possible to speed things up and remove mistakes.
Next: Part 6; The Run