Weekend Warrior
9 Medals, 9 Triathlons in 2 Days
Blenheim Palace Weekend Warrior
The second weekend in September I headed down to Oxfordshire to support my coached athlete and partner Sam Key.
The weekend warrior race is the traditional Blenheim palace Sprint triathlon as many times as you can manage within the designated time periods. The cut offs are very strict and as a coach I had calculated based on the paces Sam could potentially sustain he would finish 9 triathlons over the two days.
Although 9 triathlons would be a big ask and everything would need to go perfectly to plan for the timing to work.
With all my athletes I have them set an A, B and C goal.
Sam's goals
A - 9 triathlons
B - 8 triathlons
C - Start the Sunday not completely broken
The C goal was due to make sure that Sam paced his first day so that he would still be able to complete at least 3 triathlons the second day. Many who take on the weekend warrior end up going too hard on the first day and hardly make it back for the following day. Endurance and pacing was the name of the game.
Sam's strongest discipline compared to the rest of the field is the swim, the plan was to use the swim to recover and get back into the flow of the next triathlon.
His swims were all consistent over the entire weekend and he often came out just off the feet of Heather Fell, who is a Olympic Silver medalist in the modern pentathlon who presents GTN on YouTube.
The goals for the bike was to not go out to hard, there are a couple of climbs on the bike course. It's important to note that for a stand alone Sprint distance this would only be 3 laps and so three times up the hills per race. However with the goal to complete as many as possible, there was no point being out to smash the hills.
The run course at Blenheim is notoriously long. A fact I myself found out when I completed my first ever triathlon there in 2016. The route is actually closer to 5.5km so again the theme was to pace the run knowing that once he crossed the finish line he would be making his way back to the swim start to do it all again.
Saturday went to plan perfectly, with it being the longer day, due to the cut-offs. Sam needed to hit 5 triathlons in order to set himself up to do 4 on the Sunday.
The way the event is set out, this meant he had to join a super Sprint wave to get his 5th triathlon in.
Sunday was a bit of a slow start, Sam was feeling a bit of a niggle in his knee, taking that this was likely just muscular stiffness, he started conservatively but after the first Sprint he had got more mobility back and was able to carry on with the target paces.
After completing 3 Sprint and one super Sprint his target was achieved.
Sam finished 12th male overall with 9 triathlons broken down into 7 Sprint distance and 2 super Sprint distance triathlons.
I am super proud to have been his support crew on the day and if anything, it made me really want to get involved one year and do my own weekend warrior event.
