the long good tri-day

I’d like to say it was planned all along however, just like so many adventures and experiences, it just sort of came together its own way. What am I talking about? My active easter long weekend of course…

it started with a swim

“Come to Coogee Beach for an open water swim” they said, and so the start of my Good Friday as set. A swim inside the shark net, a “bring a plate to share” breakfast afterwards and all before mid morning…

What a great morning – a massive highlight for me was completing the longest swim I’ve done so far. 1.3km

Ok it took 56 minutes, and is well under the pace required for the 1.9km swim leg in December, but it’s a base that I can work on and represents a massive step forwards since January.

The breaky was fantastic too, and quite a few familiar faces from parkrun were also down in the area for a spot of running, swimming or cycling.

The shark net area is perfect for swim training and I intend to spend a bit more time down there for sure!

Tri Club group ride

An Easter Sunday group ride was mentioned on the Perth Tri club’s Facebook group – the main ride was shaping up to be about 90km while there was also talk of a shorter ride of about 40km. I really liked the idea of the longer distance, however I knew the pace would be challenging and instead hatched a plan to ride into Perth, do the 40km group ride and then ride home again.

It was perfect. In the end there were just 2 of us doing the 40km but I did get a chance to meet a few of the other club members before they headed off for “90 to 100”

The ride wasn’t continuous but it was my biggest day of cycling so far. 15km to Perth, 40km ride to Cockburn Central and back, then coffee and a chat, and finally a 25km “scenic route” ride home.

80km locked in….

swim, ride and then?

Easter Monday was set to be day 1 of my Gold Coast marathon training program. That was a lot of the reason I didn’t want to do a hard faster paced session on the bike.

My running coach had scheduled a run as “45 minutes easy pace”

Trouble was, I was keen to take part in the 6th running of the Easter Monday underground half marathon up at Lake Joondalup!

Fact is I haven’t done too much running since January – with the odd exception, I’ve been doing about 10km per week while the triathlon Novice Course has been in progress.

So I hatched a plan to do a 17km lap of the lake without taking the optional 4km extra loop. I also planned to run a continuous 10km and then walk the rest. It was a bit more than the 45 minutes scheduled, but was a reasonable compromise.

The plan worked well – I was very happy to have run a consistent 10km – aided by the fact I ran alongside a friend who was making a return to running after a bit of a break, and whose pace is pretty similar to mine.

We got the 10km done, enjoyed a pleasant 7km cool down walk and managed to survive!

An Easter tradition in the making?

At some point during the weekend I realised I was going to be doing a multi day triathlon, with distances a bit short of those in a 70.3 event.

In running they say “if you can do it in a week you can do it in a day” – while there are limits to that rule of thumb, it was an encouraging thought that “if I can do this in a weekend, I can do it in a day”.

All in all it made for a fantastic way to spend the long weekend, provided many opportunities to catch up with friends from different groups, and I still had plenty of time to do some easter stuff with my son, enjoy some downtime myself and catch up with the clan back in the uk.

Definitely a good way to spend the easter weekend and something I fully intend to repeat next year!


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