Mallorca 70.3 Ironman. Saturday May 7th 2016

Laura Brown flew out to Mallorca to take part in the Mallorca 70.3 ironman event. This is only Laura’s 2nd year in Triathlon and has given herself the challenge if competing in three half ironman events, this being the first of the three.

In poor weather conditions Laura finished the 1.9k swim, 56 mile bike & 13 mile run in a very respectable time of 6hrs 7 mins, with splits of 39:17 swim, 3:14:28 bike & 2:03:48 run. Overall position 1566, 151^st lady and 36^th in age group, not bad going considering Laura was stung by jelly fish in the swim and it was raining...

Race Report

By Laura Brown

My friend asked me if I wanted to race in Mallorca in May – obviously I said yes. Sun, clear blue sea, sand, villa with a pool. Well that’s what I thought. The weather forecast looked lovely for 6 out of the 7 days that I was out in Spain for the race. One day looked awful – torrential rain, thunder, lightning – you get the idea – and this happened to be the forecast for race day! They got the forecast almost spot on – luckily we didn’t have the thunder and lightning as the swim would have been cancelled but we had the torrential rain from 6am when transition opened until around 2 when I was getting to the end of the half marathon run. Due to the bad weather, it was reported that 700 competitors didn’t even start the race – so at that meant I moved up 700 places in the overall ranking!!

Swim

After a night of unsettled weather the sea had been churned up so visibility was poor in the murky water and the wind was creating waves. But as soon as the race started, there was no time to be worrying about that anymore. It was a difficult swim, especially as it was my first ever open water race, so my confidence was lacking slightly. Having a slight fear of open water swimming was not helped by the hundreds of jellyfish that had been washed onto the swim course, so being stung on any skin not covered by the wetsuit by something in the depths of the murky water did not help my irrational fear. But the jellyfish were at the further point away from the beach start/finish so there was not much I could do except for complete the swim, and when back on dry land to find out if anyone else had been stung or if I was the lucky one. By the sounds of it only 2 or 3 people out of all the race starters were not stung. I finished the swim in 39 minutes.

Bike

The Mallorca bike course is known to be a fast course. Completely flat route, except for a mountain in the middle! But obviously the many hours of winter training on the turbo helped me with the 600m climb and dealing with the self-motivation to keep pedalling even when it was hurting. After a few failed attempts at getting food and drinks from the first aid stations, mainly due to the torrential rain meaning every bottle I tried to grab slipped through my fingers. I finally got the hang of it by the third and final aid station on the bike route. The descent had many sharp turns and with the extremely wet conditions I took this part of the course very cautiously. It was only after the race that I found out over 100 people fell off their bikes during that part of the route. After the mountain was dealt with the rest of the course was as flat as a pancake but with rain still falling so hard it actually made it difficult to see, but I was not going to let a simple thing like vison slow me down. Coming into T2 I was happy very happy with my bike time of 3 hours 14 minutes (having originally aimed to get around 3 hours 30 minutes)

Run

Having picked up an injury back in February, I had been unable to do very much run training in the months leading up to the race – so I just wanted to get round the half marathon course. The furthest I had been able to run in training was 5km so this was going to be tough to do 21 km with almost no preparation. By this point the rain had started to ease off a bit but I think I was being a bit optimistic when I grabbed my sunglasses and sun visor as I ran out of T2!! I started the half marathon at a good pace but this soon slowed as I passed the 5km point and my body was just not used to running further than that, so I  had a slow and painful 16 km to complete. I was happy I managed to run the whole course, only walking through the aid stations to take on food and cola, which would give me enough of a boost to get me to the next aid station. The crowd was amazing – standing out in the rain for hours cheering on everyone who past and without them I think I would have lost motivation to continue running in so much pain. After 2 hours 3 minutes of running I saw the Ironman archway but had little energy to pose for the finishers photos so stumbled through the finish with a time of 6 hours 8 minutes – which completely smashed my original target of 6 hours 30 minutes. I couldn’t have been happier to have swum through a swarm of jellyfish, cycled up a mountain in torrential rain and ran with an injury. So I have one week off to recover and then training starts again as it’s only a few weeks until my second half Ironman on 12^th June.