They say “Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.” Clearly, they’ve followed this Ironman journey too. Here’s a quick summary of Barcelona before the memory fades and the tri-suits are washed.

Fretting. The lead up to Barcelona 70.3 had been all about the swim and the first bike cut off. You’re allowed 70 minutes for the swim and a further 70 minutes to the first bike checkpoint 27km away up a big hill – not that we don’t like big hills, we are after all, from Caerphilly.
Allowing some time for Transition 1, a slow swim was going to mean a tough ride to make the cut-off. Those of the piscine sort in our gang didn’t give it a moment’s thought; me, I fretted for weeks and weeks.
We flew Cardiff to Barcelona with Vueling. Their booking, confirmation and on-line system lead me to believe that Vueling is Spanish for ‘disorganised’ but happily (if not surprisingly) the flight, and even the landing, were smoother than getting confirmation that you were actually booked on the flight. I take it all back!

Anyway, we arrived, unpacked, built bikes and fretted, each by differing amounts and for differing reasons. We had a few days before race day so there was plenty of time to get some solid worrying in or lie in the bath shaving the legs. I went for both. I’m not sure what difference it was going to make but I passed the chiffon tri-suit test with flying colours. Surely it was also going to shave a little time off! Hohoho.
We started with a little jog up and down the front to scope out the course followed by a little swim practice to get used to the joy that is the salty Mediterranean. It wasn’t too bad. A little longshore drift meant there was going to be a fast and a slow leg but there was clarity and some fishes to break the boredom. It wasn’t a bad little swim, just right to instill a little confidence prior to the event and finalise the choice of tri-suit up or down. (down if you’re interested)
The bike recce didn’t exactly go to plan. The four of us set off to do the first leg of the bike course but, out of earshot, Scott chose to go to Barcelona and Damian and Caz didn’t see me turn onto the bike course or see the Ironman turn signs and they too went to Barcelona. Still, I knew where I was going and rode a steady but keen first leg just to see how bad it was going to be if my swim was slow and besides, I’d already been to Barcelona…
I was happy sacrificing a bit of my race day performance for the knowledge that a slow swim wasn’t going to destroy my race. (hmmmm)

The technical briefing did nothing to calm the nerves. A blue card for this, a yellow card for that, a red card for some things, penalty tents here, on the spot penalties there! I don’t think there was one rule that made things feel comfortable. The briefing suggested we were going to be under scrutiny all day and disqualified for the slightest infringement. At this point I couldn’t help feeling like a fraud. We were surrounded by triathletes who seemed to know what they were doing and even which bag to stick things in. A red sharpie and a little calf artwork might be the evening’s plan; I’d fit in better then.
Saturday, we packed our coloured bags and racked our bikes. 

Arranging transition a day in advance meant more fretting over every bag and its contents and second guessing every need. In the end I just tossed jelly babies in all the bags on the basis that you can’t go wrong with a jelly baby. I can’t deny it was a bit weird leaving your beloved bike in a football field for the evening then trying to relax whilst wondering if you’d left your bike computer on.
We dined early, retired early as let’s face it we were going to be up early!
I might have slept for oh, a least two hours, possibly less. The alarm was set for 4:00 but it wasn’t needed, I was wide awake before that simply deciding whether to wear one or two swim hats! (Two as it happens.)
The crowd in the dining room at 5:00 was quiet, reflective and not the normal hubbub of jokes and frivolity. I don’t know what the others felt like but I still felt like a fraud, surrounded by those fit, lithe triathletes waiting like coiled springs to do their job – and for their toast to brown.
All too soon we were walking through the breaking dawn to the swim start, still subdued but coupled with that nervous excitement that comes before an event. Fraud or not we’d trained for this. I could do the swim leg within the cut-off and then still have time to make the first bike cut-off. Confident but not overly so I guess.
Fuel on the bike. Tyres checked. Clothes off and in the white bag, wetsuit on and into the sea for a brief warm up and toilet break then, before we knew it, we were into the starting pens. Despite my worry I chose the 40-minute pen based on the swim we’d done earlier. (I still can’t follow the logic of panicking over a 70-minute cut off yet choosing a 40-minute pen?) If it all was going to go horribly wrong being in the wrong pen wasn’t going to make any real difference.

The Swim. Standing on a Spanish beach with the sun rising is pretty good. Being stood there with the emotive strains of Hans Zimmer’s Elysium rising to a crescendo was verging on the spiritual.
All too soon the music settled to AC/DC’s finest and the pros entered the water. Like a shoal of piranhas they thrashed their way to the first buoy and the pens started to stream their contents into the melee in their wake. One huge snake of black neoprene uncoiled and slipped into the foam down the steep beach. A stagger, a splash, a dive and woosh, and you’re in, swimming, surrounded, inundated, but travelling forward in the crowd. The buoys were large, the feet many and sighting wasn’t as bad as other previous events. The first Ironman buoy was a washing machine of arms legs and feet. Thankfully I rounded it without swimming too wide or sacrificing goggles to Poseidon or the Spanish equivalent. The long downshore leg was neat, the buoys visible and the swimmers started to spread out a little making turns two and three less messy. The return leg into the sun was impossible to sight but you could see other arms silhouetted in the morning light allowing at least a partial sighting. The left turn back towards the beach came sooner than expected and a glance at my watch as I left the sea showed a staggering 38:00. My holiday had just started, yayy! A bike ride and a run? That’s exactly what we do all the time! Let’s go!
T1 space was tight. I found the end of a bench and opened my precious bike bag, emptied it, stuffed it full of wet stuff, arranged suit, found a gloop of chamois cream for the gentleman’s wardrobe, hat, gloves, malt loaf and we’re off. Run, run, run, wave at family, leap, pedal, pedal.
I had a minor panic as I’d set my watch to auto lock and thought for a minute I’d somehow cancelled my recording. I was wearing contacts and everything closer than six feet was a blur. Random button pressing, avoiding the one I knew stopped it, seemed to restore the display to something that looked like a fuzzy rendition of a familiar screen and the panic thankfully eased.

They have the cornering skills of a Ford Capri with a safe in the boot. Do they go to a special triathlete school that only features straights?

The Ride. Geez, what is it with triathletes not being able to ride a bike? They have the cornering skills of a Ford Capri with a safe in the boot. Do they go to a special triathlete school that only features straights? The first section was technical and full of speed bumps where many appeared to have left a small offering to the asphalt gods by way of a bottle or a couple of gels. Selfishly I kept mine. It’s how I am – focussed. Poseidon didn’t get my goggles and no one’s getting my precious fuel!
The bike course was beautiful and consisted of two climbs up to a summit at Montseny, 45k distant from Calella.
Weirdly passing the triathletes down on the tri-bars climbing the hills suddenly made me think I might not be a fraud after all. My post-swim ocular migraine appeared with the dappled sunlight through the trees at 10k just to remind me not to be too smug or get too happy yet. My carefully arranged malt loaf had turned into one big piece of malt loaf and came out in sticky chunks to adorn every bike control and water bottle I touched for the rest of the ride. In fact, for the rest of the holiday!
I passed Damian on the first climb with a gentle tap on his back. ‘no dawdling’ I encouraged. I’m such a twat sometimes…
Just before the apex of the final climb I passed a German chap on a Canyon with a broken back stay. I slowed down to make sure he knew (he did) before what was going to be a fast, scary descent. He promised that he was going to ride slowly for a finish. What a guy…
The descent was treacherous, fast, winding hairpins with uneven surfaces. I saw blood, bits, gravel-rash, an ambulance and dazed riders stood by the roadside holding various components and the odd limb. Yet again the non-riding triathletes were out in force. I’m sure they think a racing line is a newspaper…
The descent opened out to long fast straights. All thoughts of penalties had gone out of the window. It was impossible to stay 25m behind the bike in front, there were so many bikes! I ended up in what could only be described as an 8 bike peloton whizzing through charming rural villages whilst keeping a watchful eye out for an official on a motorcycle. Fear not, the officials on their scooters couldn’t have matched our pace – possibly…
The final climb up to Collsacreu was made harder by the tree pollen that had been in the air all morning. Almost every competitor was coughing and spluttering and here in the still, nearly airless forest climb it became almost claustrophobic. I kept myself occupied by whistling excerpts from Dream Theater songs.
The final decent was smooth and twisty and made even better by the clock showing that a sub 3:20 seemed to be on the cards. No mean feat for me on a 1400m climb route and 20 minutes faster than my Mumbles Middle Distance bike time.
A quick sprint through the Calella outskirts, again passing those down on the tri-bars and we were back into transition and a relatively quick change for the run.

The Run. At this point my sparring partner Scott comes into play. Being part fish, he was in an earlier swim pen and way faster than me. Had I chased him down? Did I have time to pass him on the run? Could the man from Atlantis stay ahead of the man from South Wingfield? Let’s get out there and see…
I’d dumped a Snickers in my run bag as a treat. When will I learn that running and chocolate are not a good combination? Two bites and it was launched to the nearest bin. The midday sun brought with it the heat. This wasn’t going to easy. The run route was a 1.5km leg to the south then 2 loops of 9.8km up the coast.
My first sighting of Scott was him running towards me around 800m from the first turn point. We passed with a cheery wave. My mental arithmetic put him around 10 minutes ahead. With his earlier swim pen and his faster swim my guess was he was about 7 minutes ahead of me on chip time. The race was on. Under training conditions, I might just have the legs on him but 7 minutes over a half-marathon wasn’t going to be easy.
The course was flat and hot, sandy in parts, dusty, rather hot, hardly any hills and really, really hot! To quote Paula Fisch it was ‘scorchio’. OK, the locals were still wearing overcoats but these things are all relative. The outward leg followed the coast to a turn point that seemed to be always just a little further away. After the turn we moved inland for the homeward leg through a long, straight, hot Calella side street. Aid stations were thankfully copious although most of the water was needed over my head and I’d also secured a couple of sponges from a street urchin which I tucked under my top and managed to soak at every opportunity. I became very attached to my sponges, nearly to the point of giving them names and I had no choice but to bring them home with me so that they can live out their days cleaning my bicycle. My fueling wasn’t ideal. A post-race assessment showed 40% of my tailwind remaining in the bidons and ideally, I should have used 100% plus a few extras from the aid stations.
Well, there’s not a lot left to add regarding the run. The irritation I was feeling around my lower thighs turned out to be my tri-suit hanging like a nappy due to the pad being soaked. Having a large top and a medium bottom is always a compromise. A reasonable pace wasn’t enough to close the gap and a portaloo stop undid some of my hard work such that at the finish I was still 5 minutes down but at least with an empty bladder, a better fitting tri-suit and a much faster than expected 6:08 time. My estimate was 6:40 so I couldn’t be anything other than super pleased. Jane and the support crew were marvellous. Loud as always with yak bells ringing and Welsh flags waving, even adding to the Taff Ely support.
Scott was waiting at the finish. I joined him and we waited for Caz and Damian.

So ended Barcelona 70.3.

What happens in the recovery tent stays in the recovery tent, however, there’s a quiet heroine on this 70.3 that really needs a special mention before normality returns.
In the swim start pen Caz’s Garmin black-screened and wouldn’t restart. For those outside this sport it’s worth pointing out that your Garmin is everything. It tells you your heart rate, your pace, where you are and where you’ve been. You train with it, sleep with it and race with it. You rely on it and need it to make sure you’re doing exactly what you planned to do. Caz entered the water with no idea what or how she was doing. She rode the bike leg, and perhaps more importantly, ran the run leg without knowledge of her pace or heart rate. She couldn’t have known whether she needed to speed up or slow down. All she could do was ride to a gut feeling and then run likewise. To add insult to injury she has no record of how she performed other than for the official Ironman results.
I can’t begin to imagine how I would have coped if the misfortune had been mine.

Chapeau!

As always, a post-race check. Carbs from various sources totalled 248 grams with a fluid intake of 2200 ml. Marginal at best as evidenced by the low heart rate at the run end.
To my partners, Caz, Damian and Scott, thanks to you all for our continuing Ironman journey.

To our supporters Louise, Sandra, Julia and of course Jane, you know we couldn’t do it without you. xxx