Sam has taken part in the 3rd race in the ‘F3 evening triathlon sprint series’. The races attract a good high quality field for a mid-week hit out. Sam has been mixing it up at the front with podium results every race to date in this series and this is how he maintained his record…

I was feeling pretty pleased with the way training has been going since IM 70.3 UK, I picked up a fair amount of fitness improvement from that race and have managed to carry that on.

The weather was the best it had been out of the series so far. A bit of breeze in the air but no rain thankfully. I knew that that this race was going to be good as I saw Sam Gardner at the start line, who had previously beaten me in the first race of the series. As the gun went off I made sure that I got away as quick as possible. I soon found myself in second place and stuck to the leaders feet for a few hundred metres before overtaking and heading out of the water in the lead.

I got straight to work on the bike, going hard from the start to the finish. I was feeling pretty strong on the bike and enjoyed my time riding the Merida Time-Warp. I was waiting for Sam Gardner to catch me, like he had done in previous races towards the end of the bike, however it didn’t happen! Although he did enter T2 only a second or so behind me! I was first out of T2 after a quick transition.

I wasn’t feeling all that strong on the run to start with and Sam overtook me at about 1k in. I let him get away a little as I wasn’t able to keep up, but quickly got into rhythm and managed to maintain a 200m or so gap. Little did either of us know that Michal Hiscot, a very strong runner, who was over a minute down starting the run was gaining on us and in the last 2k he came storming past both me and Sam to take the lead with 200m to go. Afterwards I saw that he posted a 16.02 5k run! So I was to settle for third, 20 seconds behind Michael Hiscot and 10 seconds behind Sam Gardner.

Overall I was very happy with the race as it was an improvement from the last two I had done. Any other day the time would have been good enough for the win on this course! My bike and run have really shown improvement and I will keep trying to work on these with some interval training sessions over the next couple of weeks.

With thanks to our sponsors:

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