Third Overall - 15th July 2012

Leafing through the triathlon calender at the beginning of the year, my eyes were drawn to the "City of Birmingham" sprint distance triathlon held at Sutton park on the 15th July. This seemed to be an ideal race as my mother and quite a lot of my family live only one mile from the park, and soon an entry was in and plans were made for a family get together with me as the main spectacle and entertainment.

Me and the support crew (Ben) travelled up on the Saturday to recce the swim and bike courses and I've got to say that first impressions were not the best. The bike course was run on internal park roads and the laps were short, rough in places and had 6 speed humps on each lap - not really TT bike freindly but still the same for everyone.

After a good night's sleep, we arrived and got set up in transistion as usual. The event attracted a very big field of nearly 800 entrants in total, 200 of which were in the male sprint group - gulp!

After a lot of "good lucks" and "do you think you'll win it" from the family, I entered the water with all the others. Looking round at how many of us there were, I knew it was going to be very physical and I wasn't wrong - the swim was very tough with elbows, arms and legs flying everywhere. I gave as good as I got though and soon found a good rhythm and after two laps exited the water in about 25th position (very pleased with this) - a run into transistion and wetsuit off and gone with the bike .

The support on the bike was amazing - the biggest yet by a mile and with family shouts of encouragement I hammered the bike big time, ha ha, setting the outright fastest time of the day and by this point I felt really good. Into transistion again and I've learned to be much calmer now and think about the change as I'm running in and it helped because I flew in and out and ran for the first time in my new very light Newton running shoes. The 5km course was all off-road and very rough in places and I passed a couple of nasty looking falls but I felt great and came through the first lap strong. I had no idea where I was in the overall standings because, as is often the case, we get mixed up with the previous race but I was still passing people and pushed on hard. On the last half mile I passed the family and with their shouts ringing in my ears pushed as hard as I could for the finish, just passing another athlete near the line and sprinted/fell through the line.

I came 3rd overall and won my age group by a good margin. I was very pleased with this result in what was a large field. Everything is going well and on top of the previous Bedford Box End sprint result of 6th overall and 1st place age group I feel the hard training, correct nutrition and early nights are paying off. That's it for now except a couple more club TTs and then a week's holiday in Cornwall (if it stops raining) and then it's a 6 week solid build up to Rother Valley GBR qualifier on Sept 16th and I am really going to give that everything!