Blenheim Inline Mudbath#

Fri, 26 May 2006 13:00:00 +0000

I'd better write this up before I forget completely. Executive summary: muddy and very very slippery, rubbish warmup (my back hurt for two days afterwards), some ups and downs that were great fun, and (depending on how you count) either a roughly fourth place finish, or a DNF. Read on for details.

Blenheim Palace is near Woodstock (to the north of Oxford), and was originally promised to the first Duke of Marlborough by the grateful taxpayer for beating the French in 1704. (In fact, as it turned out the good Queen Anne failed to come through with all of the money and the Duke had to pay for quite a lot of it himself)

More relevantly for our purposes, there's a reasonably smooth path all the way around the grounds of Marlborough Country, on which the London Triathlon people were running the bike leg of the Blenheim Triathlon last weekend. And we (LSST) managed to squeeze in a half-marathon on skates on the same track, before they started.

Depending on where you, gentle reader, are located, you may or may not be aware that it's been raining a lot lately in the south of England. All things considered we were quite lucky that the sky was dry on Saturday morning - although less lucky that the track, or some parts of it, was not. And was convered in mud, leafmould, twigs, and so on. I used to live in the country - it was just like that. So there was an awful lot of sliding around, and on one uphill even the lead pack were actually ascending at slower than walking pace. Very silly.

My race: it was cold, and i didn't warm up sensibly, so I pretty much missed the train at the start (and got myself backache in the process). After a few minutes of people passing me, I formed a line with fellow LSST people Mike and Garan, and we stuck together for most of the race. Somewhere about two thirds of the way through the last lap (I admit, i thought I was nearer the end) knowing that Mike could almost certainly outsprint me over a short stretch but that (judging from the uphills) I could probably keep him at bay on a longer sustained effort, I took off, and eventually, when I found the finish line, finished ahead of him and Garan.

So, where did I finish? Sadly, when the official (provisional) results were published, it looks like my chip didn't register on my first lap - it said I raced two laps only, in 00:32:02 and 00:15:30. So, DNF. Which rather puts a damper on the event for me. I've queried this with the organisers, but not heard anything back yet. In the meantime, Garan took fourth place, and Mike (who took a wrong turn near the end) fifth. So there must have been a lot of people ahead of us who dropped out at some point - or who also had problems with the timing system.

Lessons for next time (Hannover-Celle, this Sunday): (1) warm up is much more important when it's cold out; (2) find out where the finish is before before breaking for it. Oh, and (3) in addition to the stated purpose of leg shaving (road rash), if you're going to do races where you get caked in mud to waist height, it's much easier to brush it off afterwards if the legs are smooth ;-) But hopefully mud will not be a problem this weekend.

In happier news, email from Daniel Junker says he'll have new boots for me on or around June 6th.