Forest Fun
Wow, what a day! Sunday (25th July) saw a double-header at High Lodge with the 3rd adult summer series duathlon in the morning and the first of our new junior duathlon events in the afternoon.
After setting up the course on Saturday and a final check before things kicked off, the only major worry was the weather forecast. It was a bit dull for the morning but nothing worse materialised. Our time-keeper Pete optimistically stated ‘the sun’s coming out’, but it was just a patch of slightly thinner cloud!
Nevertheless, the competitors were faced with muggy conditions probably making it feel hard work. The overnight rain probably helped make the sandy sections feel a little easier, although one competitor did mention they had wet feet a few times (Ok, each and every time they passed through transition), but they did seem very jolly about it!
That’s the great thing about these event, people seem to have fun whatever the conditions and everyone encourages everyone else regardless of speed.
There were some impressive performance as usual with Jacob Sowman coming out on top in 34:03 with fastest lady being Sarah Steele in 44:48. However, the most impressive performance was no doubt from Daniel Harle who is making great strides with his fitness not only knocking a big chunk off his time from 2 weeks ago, but simultaneously managing to collect the run signs in for us:-)
All the results are here.
For the afternoon we re-configured things for our junior entrants who would take a run-bike-run of there own with a little variation in distances depending on age.
The youngest group (5-7 year olds) tackled a 300m run, 1km bike and 100m finishing dash. The 7-9 year old’s took on the same course, except they had a second 300m run to make it to the finish line. There were some mightily impressive performances from the 9 entrants, and especially one young lady who took a tumble on the bike section only to get up and finish in impressive style…she was so quick that our race directed couldn’t keep up when trying to run alongside!
Results for the junior event are here.
Our Hi-Vis heroes did an amazing job again, especially in helping us keep the juniors safe and on-course!
We are now trying to recover and get ready for September which is going to be a big month with more adult and junior duathlon-ing on 5th September followed by Stradbroke Triathlon and Junior Aquathlon on the 19th.
All the best
Iain & Jill