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Win #2 At Dorney Lake!

I am very pleased to report that I won the 2nd 220 Evening race at Dorney Lake last Wednesday night. Not only did I win, I managed to wipe almost 2 mins off my previous time from a month ago and had a 3 min lead on the 2nd placed woman. I have been training hard and really pushing myself and it is starting to pay off!

Before the race I spent a 3 day weekend in Nice with The Dutchman doing some awesome training. Originally we had booked the 3 day weekend so we could do La Fausto Coppi Gran Fondo in Italy, a 210km race with 4500m of climbing. Unfortunately the highest pass is still not open due to large amounts of snow over the winter so the race has been postponed to August and clashes with the London Tri so I am going to have to give it a miss this year. We decided to cycle over to Italy anyway and went to Ventimiglia which is on the coast for a quick pizza on the beach and caught the train back to Nice. I love the novelty of cycling into another country for a few hours, certainly not something you can do in Australia :)

I felt really good going into the race, and I have been using the evening races as training races for the Women’s Only Timex race this coming weekend, also at Dorney Lake. This time we swam in the smaller of the 2 lakes and I came out of the water feeling strong. I had managed to latch onto some feet for half of the swim which was very handy as the person I was drafting off had an amazing kick which made it a lot easier for me! Into T1 and out of my new Aqua Sphere Ironman Icon wetsuit kindly supplied by Wiggle and Aqua Sphere. This is the 3rd wetsuit I have ever swum in and I feel like I am in the Ferrari of wetsuits. My first wetsuit was one I bought off eBay to do my first wetsuit based race 3 years ago at London Tri. It was 2 sizes too big and was more like a bin liner, there was more water in the wetsuit than in the docks!! Despite that I was bitten by the tri bug and upgraded to a 2XU elite wetsuit the following year in preparation for Ironman UK. I have been in the 2XU suit for the past 2 years which has been great but I have always had issues getting it off in T1. The Aqua Sphere Ironman Icon wetsuit peels off so easily and is of course a must when doing short distance. It made a huge difference to my T1 time at Dorney Lake and is very comfortable to swim in. If it is good enough for Faris al Sultan, it is good enough for me!!

It always seems to be windy at Dorney Lake, which is an advantage for me. I am so aero on the Focus Izalco Chrono that I feel like I am slipping under the wind. I just keep my head down and tap into the power I have been building doing those long climbs in the Alps on my 2 trips to Nice a month. Each bike training session in Nice is generally 2 – 3 tough climbs where I go all out. If I am not going all out, I do short interval bursts and that is probably harder because the recovery is up so you never really get a break. Add in The Dutchman reminding me it isn’t a vacation and it is a very hard session!

I was very pleased with my bike leg and hit T2 feeling fresh. I wanted to get home faster than my previous 1:14:56 so I decided to push hard early on rather than wait for the last lap. There were also a lot more people doing this race so I knew the competition would be tougher and I wanted to give myself a bit of a cushion and try and make the top 3 ladies. I’m racing in my Pearl Izumi Streak running shoes with elastic laces which speeds up T2, and my running! They are feather light and really comfortable without socks. I put a bit of Vaseline in the heel to stop any blisters and to make sure my foot slips right in. The run was 2 laps out and back which was good as you can see where people are. There was a guy I know, Rob, who is a great runner. I was ahead of him coming off the bike and I spotted him catching me at the last turn around point. It then became a case of trying to reach the next milestone before Rob overtook me :) I managed to hold him off until the last 400m or so and was very pleased to finish only 6 seconds behind him.

I finished the race in 1:12:50 and was ecstatic as this was the fastest I have ever done a sprint race in, beating my old PB by 2 minutes. I was hoping that was enough to get me 1st place. My running buddy Sam Renouf who is an ex pro Ironman athlete and now works at Active.com who handle the online race entry was commentating the race and told me I would be lucky to make top 3 as there were some very speedy girls in the first wave. He kept me hanging for a good 15 minutes before he admitted he was only winding me up. I think I will be taking him on an extra tough run this week to say thanks for that!!

All in all a great Wednesday night out! A new pair of goggles and a £50 voucher which is being used for race entry fees for the next evening race in 4 weeks. I am really excited that I have 2 wins for 2 tri races this year. Lets see if I can make it 3 for 3 this weekend out at the Timex Women’s Only race.

Happy training.
Cx

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 9:14 am and is filed under Carolyn Hewett, Team Wiggle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.