By Nigel Burnell
As the Covid-19 regulations have been relaxed, events are slowly returning to normal with Park Run restarting, as Maria recently highlighted, and the Banana Triathlon going ahead at Dorney Lake with social distancing measures. However, there has been plenty of disruption along the way. My season had been planned around the European Aquathlon Age Group Championships in Austria in June and the Worlds in the Netherlands in September, both already deferred from 2020. Both have now been deferred again and the 2022 Worlds in Australia have already been cancelled. So, definitely a plan B scenario!
Changing my plans, I returned to another event that had disappeared during the pandemic, namely Masters (age groups from 35+) athletic competitions. Like open water swimming races or cycling time trials, age group track racing provides the chance to work on a single triathlon discipline.
That was the theory as I lined up on a track in Wimbledon to run a 5,000 metres race one night a few weeks back but the temperature of 29 degrees was not quite what I had expected!
In the current world several things were unusual, notably safety pins were not provided as a Covid-19 precaution. The instructions were clear in bringing 8 safety pins (not 7 not 9) with 4 for the front and 2 lots of 2 for the rear number and age group number. Secondly, all results would be online rather than posted up at the event as normally happens. Also, as a sign of the times, a link to a list of permitted shoe makes and models was emailed out beforehand. Carbon is fine for bikes but not for running shoes if you are a rusty!
Dan’s experience of being time barred due a puncture at the Bolton Ironman made for a heart-breaking read, but on the track I had my own taste of fine margins. In the heat I was hoping to break 20 minutes but was just outside in the latter stages. I stopped my watch at 19 minutes 59 seconds but when I checked online later the electronic timing came up as 20 minutes 00.00 seconds. Just one hundredth of a second quicker would have been a whole lot better!
Hopefully, multi-sport events will be fully back to normal soon (though maybe not in Australia). At least the timings for aquathlons and triathlons don’t come out to a hundredth of a second.