So my wife, Joanne, qualified last year in Muskoka for the ITU Olympic Distance World Championships in London, England this year!
A long time to wait though… over a year… but more time to train, I guess! Anyway, after a year of hard training with her buddies at TCOB and Oakville Masters… the day finally arrived! Claudia, Helene, Margaret also qualified, but Margaret also qualified for Ironman World Championships in Kona this fall… so
she skipped the Olympic Distance World Champs to do Kona… coming up soon! Turns out there were a few other LOSTies and TCOB friends that made it to World Champs too! Michael Parker made it in the sprint… Emilie Heath, Lori Stewart made it in the Olympic Distance and Allan Crowe made it in both! And unfortunately I didn’t realize until after, but the wife of my my swim-master for my Lake Ontario Crossing last year was there too… Allison Chisholm!
Now people keep asking me “so, how did she do?!” Which is always kind of a tough one to answer… I mean, she didn’t win… but she wasn’t expecting to… but she had a “good race”. I mean different races have different focus (which already sounds like I’m making excuses… but I’m not!). Some races you are going for a specific time (Boston Marathon Qualifying time, for example)… or a specific placing (placing in the top 3… or placing high enough to qualify for a race… like they all did to get to this race!)… and sometimes you are just there to take it all in and enjoy the experience (my first Boston was like that… I had just finished Marathon des
Sables a week earlier… I had needed a 3:20 to qualify… and was quite happy doing a 4:39 in the actual race… qualifying was the challenge… running Boston was the reward!)… and some races are a bit of both. This one was a bit of both.
Joanne said from the beginning that she wanted to race hard and was in good shape to do it… but she also had never been to London before. When I swam the English Channel (or attempted it!)we spent all of our time in Dover, so London was new for her (I’d been for work a few times). So she was all keen to get over there a week early… to acclimatize… which meant shopping and sightseeing. I
came over a few days later… and we did more sight seeing than I have ever done in my life… I was a mess by the end of each day… and quite happy to try out as many pubs as possible! I could have easily run the distances that we walked… and would have much preferred to do that… but we walked… and that just kills my calves and back. I was amazed she did as well as she did, because I sure as hell couldn’t have raced when Sunday rolled around! But like I said… she had two goals for this race… to race as hard as she could… and to see London! Fortunately it’s easier to do both when the race is 3 hours… than when it’s 13 hours!
So if it looks like I’ve included more touristy pictures than race pictures… well that’s why… that was half the point of the trip and race!
As for the race… actually races… it was kind of weird… it had the feeling of an Ironman, but it wasn’t. It had all the pomp and ceremony of an Ironman… but it was weird/cool to see everyone there representing their countries! And it was weird that there wasn’t one big race… there was a whole bunch of short races. There was the World Championships in Aquathlon, The Sprint Distance, The Olympic Distance… and within each there was the Elite Division (ie the Pros and Olympians!), the top Male and Female AgeGroupers in the world and the Paralympians and there was even an Open Division… meaning anyone could pay up and enter… which I could have done, but I was quite content to just tag along a sherpa/bike mechanic/pub tester!!! There was always a ton of races going on… for 4 days!
The race itself was set up really well and was the same course as they had used for the Olympic Distance Triathlon in the London Olympics a year earlier (more or less). They swam in the “the Serpentine” in Hyde Park (think: a large lake in Central Park, by comparison)… then rode throughout the Park and downtown London! Past Buckingham Palace (Jo confessed she did slow down a bit to take that all in!)… along the Thames… and the turnaround was at the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge! About as spectacular of a course as you are likely to see anywhere! It would have been a cool course to be wearing a “Go Pro” on your helmet!
There was, of course, at catch. It was London… in September… which means rain. Torrential rain. For days on end. The Sprint went on the Friday… and it poured. There were more crashes on the bike than I’d ever heard of. Michael and Allan were both in this race. Michael is a wiley old vet (and very fast!) and he said it was really scary… the cobblestone roads and speed bumps and rough patches didn’t help any either. Michael said he overheard, and agreed with, one guy who commented “I’ve got to go to work on Monday!” Apparently right near the end of the race, the 4 leaders went down all on the same corner, and not even in a pack… just the same slippery spot! Yikes.
This didn’t instill a lot of confidence in anyone for their race on Sunday. Helene, who most of you know is an awesome rider, was very nervous. Joanne, who usually chick’s me on the bike, is a big chicken to begin with… and she was terrified. There was a lot of talk of people pulling out.
So we continued to sight-see… and hope for the best. And drink beer.
But Sunday finally came. And Jo and I were walking across the muddy park before the sun had come up… when Jo looked up and noticed… she could see the stars! It was true… the sun eventually came up and there was not a cloud in the sky! (well, at least until they got to the run, when it started raining again… but everyone was more than thankful for that!).
The funny thing is… after all the worry about the bike… it was the swim that ended up being a problem. The water temp was apparently about 14C / 57F and the air temp was about the same… so between the two
temps, they decided to cut the 1.5 km swim in half! Only 750 m! That kinda sucked… and given that Helene and Jo had been swimming in Lake O lots this summer they were fine with the temp, so it didn’t really work to their advantage… but tri’s aren’t generally skewed in favor of swimmers anyway! Funny thing is Jo and I went in for a “warm up” dip the day before and it wasn’t that cold… although I was clearly the only one in the water with no wetsuit… judging by all the crazy looks I was getting! It was fine.
In the end, the race went off without a hitch… everyone seemed to have a pretty good race… no injuries or blow ups! Because of the course being shortened and a bit of an unusual course, it was kind of hard to compare times, but I’ll just leave it as… a good time was had by all!
Congrats you World Champions!!!
Here are the actual results:
Cheers,
Rob
One nice thing was the route was a lot of back and forth and I had no idea where people where going… but they passed by me frequently… so I got to see, and cheer for everyone, several times! In fact, I found a spot with not many people, where I could get up close and made a point of cheering each and every Canadian that came by! Lots of fun!