Blenheim Palace Triathlon: How Many Races Can Heather Do? | GTN Vs The Weekend Warrior

after a couple of months away from triathlon and any type of training i am back and straight in at the deep end the gtn team has thrown me a challenge one which no one else was available for apparently anyway i have to attempt to complete as many sprint triathlons as i possibly can in one weekend what could possibly go wrong [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] i should first start by explaining what a weekend warrior is and why i want to be one i might struggle on that latter point but usually a weekend warrior is someone who does very little exercise in the week and sort of binge exercises on the weekend instead of drinking loads of wine you go and do loads of exercise well i've come to the blenheim triathlon it's a stunning venue here but it's a sprint triathlon which sounds great get it done dusted you can then go and have your glass of wine afterwards however the weekend warrior is an attempt to do as many of these sprint triathlons as you can in one weekend yeah i'm still not really sure why i'm doing it the standard has been set high last year in 2020 a new record was set by stephen mott who completed an impressive 11 sprint triathlons back to back over the weekend with a 750 meter swim and in this case a 19.8 kilometer bike and 5.4 kilometer run it equates to a total of 8.25 k of swimming 217.8 kilometers of cycling and 59.4 k of running oh and then you've got the long uphill transition from the swim to the bike and of course getting from the run finish back to the swim start i've got two ways in which i can approach this i could just see it as a sprint and go all out and see how far i can kind of keep going or i really pace myself and treat it more like an iron man and kind of you know go about it more slowly i've got my wahoo element rival and bolt which will communicate to each other so i can have no excuses when it comes to pacing and i do slightly worry though that i might just you know think it's a sprint triathlon which it is and cross the line with nothing left alright so this is where i get my compulsory excuses in and please don't send me to our excuses video just hear me out on this one i am very unfair i've had two months in japan where i've not been able to swim or cycle and had a couple of weeks of quarantine so running has been a little bit sort of to the wayside as well because i was there for work sadly not a training camp so it's going to be a bit of an experiment and i really have no idea what my body can actually manage but i'm willing to give it a go so it's probably time to go and wrap my bike and get ready [Music] kind of excited because it's just so great to be at a race like we've had such a what year and a half and just to see everybody else who's excited which i'm i'm fueling off that energy which i'm hoping is going to get me through because i don't have fitness so i've got to go with enthusiasm and yeah that's what it's about it can be much more of a beautiful day it's absolutely stunning here and it's not too cold and everyone's really happy and smiley so hopefully i'll still be feeling like this at the end we'll see come on let's do this [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] one done and who knows how many to go well that's the nerves out the way at least and i'm now familiar with the course the extra transition however is a different challenge no time for a finish line celebration it's straight through the finish and a run all the way over to the lake to meet my team well i'm lucky to have adam and jonty sorting my kit taking my trainers and my race belt from me and helping me into my wetsuit and their role doesn't stop there i'll hopefully be met with a fully prepared t1 and t2 by the time i exit the swim [Music] [Applause] [Music] finish for the second time take two i'm not gonna get excited i've got a few more to go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's the best bit of triathlon the recovery when i get to eat lots um i'm gonna leave the jelly babies in here for tomorrow but i'm doing sensible nutrition but this is the hard part because it's really weird i think i've ever done a multi-sport event when yes i recover but i normally recover with some chips and a few glasses of wine and that's probably not going to help me for tomorrow so i've kind of got to like do what my body needs but also still get ready for tomorrow and i've had a massage i'm going to maybe put some compression tights on and just yeah put my feet up and hope that when i wake up tomorrow morning my body will still function because i'm not i'm not sure it's going to well goal for tomorrow is to make sure i'm still smiling at the end of it because i've had such a lovely time today and it's just been great chatting to people and doing this beautiful event so that's the key goal and then it's an earlier cutoff so i need to actually look at the times and see if i need to push myself because i don't know if i maybe need to try and like actually set a target time because today i just kind of went and did it and then i just missed a cut off which is a bit frustrating and i'm kind of going in hindsight oh what if what if could be dangerous but yeah i might i might actually target a number and sometimes we'll see we'll see how i feel in the morning [Music] oh i feel hungover and as though i've been run over by a bus i only had one glass of wine last night so i'm guessing the five triathlons took a little bit more out of me than i realized and adrenaline must have got me through the day it's hard to explain right now but my body hurts to even touch and my mouth is so dry note to self i need to rehydrate better anyway i can't imagine even beginning let alone completing several triathlons so i'm not going to try it's going to take all my focus and effort to get through this first one and then hopefully the crowd and another dose of adrenaline will see me through the rest of the day [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well i survived as you probably realized by now and i was even still smiling at the end and it's kind of bizarre to think now how i was really fearful of this event i thought that i was just going to fail i couldn't imagine my body being able to do more than one triathlon and i thought well how is this going to be a gtm video if um you know i don't get past one having done basically no prep for it and it's amazing what endurance kind of base you don't realize you even have so yeah i was just hugely happy and relieved to have managed it but also to have such a good time um the run especially so i mean on the bike i got more and more confident each lap and just started to really enjoy it and felt slightly guilty being on the lovely callus b-max because i was just flying past people on their downhill stretch just kind of resting with my aero bars but i was going to take any kind of help i could get and then the run was just kind of a big party everyone was just having so much fun or okay some people were in the hotel but most people were just happy to be out doing an event and i had some people to chat to there's actually one guy i have to do a shout out for um or two kieran um ran several laps with me and put up with me chatting away to him and would just happen to kind of be a similar pace on the run i think i was quick on the bike on on the swim he was quick on the bike so we kind of met on the run um and that was just really nice to have someone to talk to bumped into a friend towards the end as well um on one of that when i was really struggling and i had really painful stomach but it just distracted me for long enough to kind of get me through a section of the run and yeah it's amazing i think what the the power of the brain can have over the body i think one of the hardest parts which did surprise me was actually the fueling because i love food i think that's not really um something i hide but when it comes to an iron man which is pretty much the distance that i covered you get plenty of time on the bike to take on food and digest it but this it was well quite a sort of intense laugh anyway on the bike so you've got some sharp downhill bits that are quite fast and then the upfield it's quite steep and there was never really a time when you could kind of just relax and think okay i take on food now but also you didn't have very long on the bike i was on the bike for about 40 minutes and then i'd be running again so it was when do i eat and i was finding that i just wasn't hungry and i had a bento box full of all sorts of treats i mean if you had a look in there you'd be shocked there was i basically just put everything in there and thought well surely i want something out of it i kind of kept opening it as like i think for the first couple of triathlons all i had was one jelly baby and i was like oh no don't like that um and then i realized i'm gonna need some fuel so i started drinking a carb drink which i hadn't tried before yeah don't tell me i know i should know better that you should not try something new on race day and whether it was that whether it was dehydration whether it was just the fact that my body was kind of in shock but towards the end of the fourth full triathlon my stomach was just in bits and i had to kind of i was like refusing to walk but i was running a bit double i was in so much pain i was like come on you've got to get around this and that was definitely the low point and i mean i always knew something was gonna sort of restrict me but i didn't think it'd be my stomach i thought it would more likely be my legs but you learn from every triathlon you do don't you [Music] and it's really funny how my mentality changed throughout the the race or the event because i started off the day genuinely going i'm just gonna cruise and try to preserve my body and see how far i got and then i suddenly started going well hang on i could be competitive like how many triathlons can i actually do and it wasn't until the fourth one that i realized i could maybe have a chance of getting in a fifth one before the cut off the cutoff was at 2 40. i crossed the line of the fourth one at 2 42. and it's really weird to think that i was then almost annoyed that i didn't manage to get in another full one when at the start of the day i was like i just want to be able to do this so i still had time to fit in another super sprint but it didn't mean that i could just completely chill on that last one because there was nothing more i could do for the day and i just went really slowly and kind of enjoyed it tried to use it almost as a warm dan but part of me still had that bit of annoyance i was like oh what if i could have found two minutes here or two minutes there so yeah it's it's weird isn't it how you can just suddenly go from being just excited to have done it and now i've had chance to look at the results and i have to admit i am totally shocked i'm just gonna have to share them with you uh because i'm actually yeah quite proud of this so i finished fourth overall in the weekend warrior um and i was first woman i completed nine triathlons in total so seven of those were sprint and two supers went and no one else did more um and it turns out it was the overall time that gave us our positions so my times i covered a total of 214.6 kilometers over the weekend so not far off in ironman um 11 hours 53 of activity plus about 500 meters of running every lap because you had to get back to the transition but you know i'm not going to go on about that one but yeah my times 123 123 128 125 on saturday sunday 126 126 127 so not too much different and then my super sprints were 57 and 55 on sunday so i finished strong

Channel: Global Triathlon Network

Views: 37,717

Keywords: blenheim palace, blenheim triathlon, weekend warrior, warrior, endurance, goals, open water swimming, GTN, Global Triathlon Network, triathlon, Triathlon (Sport), tri, ironman, Sports, swimbikerun, triathlon training, triathlon skills, iron man, tri bike, triathlete, swimming, cycling, running, training, skills, coaching, heathler fell, wahoo fitness, ӱ, 4472, Վ, Ꮽ, Ᏹ, Ᏼ, ψ, Յ, Ն, ꕈ, ዩ, ꖧ, ꔨ, ꔣ, ᠫ, К, ꘖ, ཙ, எ, ꗨ, की, ፕ15, チ

Id: PAjsI1z46JM

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021