My SHOCKING race at Holten Itu world Cup on Saturday.

Hi All.

This weekend was a BIG fail in my books, First REALLY big race being a World Cup triathlon and in another different country!

The race took place in the small town of Holten in Netherlands. Wikus Weber and myself had a very interesting journey to Holten by doing the following. We woke up at 1:30am to catch out taxi to the Leeds train station. Our train left at 2:20am and we arrived about 4pm in Manchester. We then caught a flight to Amsterdam and waited for the bus to collect us. The bus had no air conditioner and it took   and bikes to the town of Holten some 190km away.

We arrived and were so tired all we did was hit the bed for the next hour and a half. Soon after our snooze we had to find our way to the registration and briefing. This was easy and things went really smooth the rest of the day with a great super consisting of 2 sandwiches and some coke.

I was ready for the race but felt like i was lazy all day long as our rooms didn’t have AC either. I found this quite funny  as we were staying at a Hotel called the AC Holten with NO-AC haha.

Race Morning and Wikus and myself made our way down to T2 to drop off our running shoes. We saw the females come past a few times on the bike with Marie Rabi doing a lot of work up front, looking in control!

We soon made our way to T1 and the swim start. The Heat was really getting bad now and it was about  35 degrees with no shade. I started to get pumped for the race and they started to play James Blunt ,of all people, over the sound system. I think this put everyone off racing for the moment, I MEAN PLEASE!

My warm up in the man-made Dam was good but i felt a bit lazy. I assumed that the laziness was due to the heat and that i would get out of it soon. The Swim started and i felt good for the first 300m towards the 1st bouy.

From the second bouy, i started to feel very tired for some wierd reason and soon became quite unmotivated at how I was feeling. I started to contemplate about stopping in the 1st lap of the swim as i really was feeling weak!.

I found some feet in the swim and was soon building my confidence back up. This was short-lived as I would see that I was quite a way back from the leaders on the bike.

Into transition and i had just lost the feet of the Ireland athlete in front of me!!Now i was really unhappy. I caught two guys in front on me but the 3rd pack was just out of reach for me. On the bike and i was with two weak cyclists ” or so I thought” and we started to work together.

The 1st real climb came, and the one guy started to sprint up this 10Degree climb. Now i was really thinking of stopping. And soon after this thought i did.

Not a good race. Wasnt really keen to race, but apparently the only was you learn is from having a bad race……. HENCE i have learnt a LOT!

Next race will be at the end of the month, Offenburg ” hopefully” and it is a sprint race where I hope to see how I can do against the top guns in the swim.

Below is the results of the males race.

1.	Ivan Tutukin	RUS	01:54:21
2.	Yulian Malyshev	RUS	01:54:23
3.	Joao Pereira	POR	01:54:24
4.	Brice Daubord	FRA	01:54:27
5.	Danylo Sapunov	UKR	01:54:38