Auch Triathon

Location:
Auch and the Pyrenees
Date:
09/28/2008
The Auch Triathlon was a bit short for my liking but the prize money was truly worth trying! I had opted for the previous month to test drive ovalish shaped chainrings to see what the fuss was about.
These are probably not bad for specific type of riders but for someone who has spent a lot of time on a fixed gear I really felt like I lost time on them on certain courses....
Auch started with a river swim and the water was quite cold! we had to swim up river 250m around a bouey and back and then up again 500m and back. As you can imagine the river is narrow and i swam right up on some poor guy's shoulders befre long....Philippe (my partner) and I have been practicing in the local lake so I have improved some but I stll cant swim very fast...yet
Finally out of the water and on to the bike I lost a good 16 minutes to the first woman....I caught most of the women with the exception of one and this, yes, I do attribute to my chainrings only because there were a few guys ahead as well that I would normally pass yet i really felt like i was pedalling square. In any case I was still missing a few minutes and narrowed the time gap down from 16 to 3-4 but couldnt seem to make it up on the 10kms run.
I settled for 2nd and will have an article up on the french part of this site soon as the article is in french.
THe most difficult part of this was that the triathlon started at 4pm, finished at 6pm and the next morning i was due to ride 156kms over 4 mountain passes at the L'apebie in the Pyrenees mountains.
Soon as i received my prize I zipped home and philippe and I drove into Luchon at around midnight....The following day the weather was gorgeous and even better was the beer at the finish!
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