Racing in Goa - Feb '18

Early January 2018 I received the invite to the annual Group Internal Audit conference to be held in Pune, India. The year before it had been held in Goa and I absolutely loved the place. Goa is not *that* far from Pune so I idly wondered if I’d have time to go there for a few days before the conference started.

While googling, I saw that a triathlon event was being organised the preceding weekend. That settled it – I had time. There was both a standard distance triathlon (1.5km swim, 40km bike, 10km run), and a sprint Duathlon (5k run, 20k bike, 5k run). When looking at the course on-line I saw that for the 1500m swim athletes were expected to swim 700m out to sea, go parallel to the coast for 100m, and swim back. Not being a strong swimmer I was horrified.

I signed up for the Duathlon.

Logistically getting there was a bit of a nightmare. The flight to Mumbai landed around 1 am, and the connecting flight was at around 2.30am. Indian bureaucracy meant transferring between the flights was a bit touch and go. I landed in Goa around 4am Saturday morning, and got to the hotel by 5am. This was 25 hours before the start of the Duathlon. I got a few hours’ sleep. Saturday afternoon I made our way to the beach, and went for a little swim. I’d forgotten how buoyant sea water is, and I think it’s particularly salty in the shallows around Goa. Perhaps I should have done the triathlon after all, I thought.

Sunday, at the crack of dawn…..actually, well before the crack of dawn, I was setting my bike up at the transition in almost total darkness, illuminated solely by phones. The generator that the organisers had brought had failed, and they had no extension lead anywhere long enough to run from the nearest alternative power source.

I wondered when the sun would rise. I had a feeling the first run would be in darkness, as would some of the bike leg. And that, I thought, could prove interesting as the roads were not closed and no cyclists had lights.

And sure enough we set off running in darkness. Getting back to the bike, and trying to change shoes with little light while organisers ran around with their phones was interesting!

The ride was good. I overtook a few riders, one or two overtook me, but I felt strong. There weren’t that many cars, so I wasn’t too worried about collisions. By the end of the cycle leg I thought I was around 5^th, and daylight had fully broken. Then onto the final run. Oh it hurt. The temperature was climbing back to over 30 degrees, the hills seemed steeper, the 5k longer.

A young whippersnapper overtook me. I overtook a guy around my age. Running to the finish line seemed to take forever, as I hadn’t studied the course too carefully. The final bit was a short up-hill run to the hosting hotel, and then a finishing chute. I’d done it.

I came 5/62 - not bad.