Race day

I lay in bed but couldn’t sleep. I think I finally dropped off around 3:50… The alarm went at 4.

Breakfast was coffee, cornflakes and more coffee. I also had some sports drink and a little flapjack. Good to see the new streamlined CRAB Don arrive – extremely good effort on the moustache!

Then down to transition to pump up my bike tyres with G-Sport’s comedy pump (I think there must be a knack to it), to faff some more and to queue repeatedly for the loo.

Ten minutes to go to the start and I finally remembered to put my Garmin on my bike (14 hours of battery life left – would it be enough?) then I headed towards the start. Sadly I’d missed the “special needs” lorries by this stage so that messed up my food and drink plan a little (but then I didn’t reallly have a plan so that was OK).

Then off to the beach… where I arrived to find a priest praying for us… it was all very sombre and serious and there were a few people crossing themselves – wibble!

I bumped into some old work colleagues. Then I bumped into Lizzy from TripeTalk who I’d met in Almere last year.

Then I heard something about two minutes to go and people started heading into the water.