Race 15: Triathlon de Quiberon 2nd September 2007. Olympic distance

The Quiberon triathlon is one of my favorite French triathlons. Its not a super easy course but is very picturesque as most of the course involves the coastline. Last year I was first out of the water and then significantly beaten by Laurent Suppi who won, while Franky Batillier was second. This year I was second out the water behind Chris Felgate. We had quite a good lead not helped that on our way in on the first lap of the two lap swim we were told to swim on an angel towards the beach turn can and not directly in (the fast way). There were some tense moments as we were in waist deep water being told to swim by the arbiters. We ended up dolphining parallel to the shore then running up and around the buoy. On the bike I settled in to my own sort of pace and then a few kilometers later passed Chris to take the race lead. I stayed here for the remainder of the bike leg and I think came in for the final changeover with about 1:50 lead on a pack containing Chris, Jerome Joussemet of Parthenay, Bertrand Siffroy and Laurent Levezu of Cesson and Mathieu Gaudin of Pessac Tri. I needed that lead as it turned out. After the initial 200m of running through the crowd the euphoria passed and the painful sensation in my feet took most of my attention. Normally feet rubbing in shoes is of only minor concern, but the week before my feet had copped a bit of a battering and I still had two big holes on the inner parts of my foot that would not go away. I had used the old socks trick in transition, but strangely they were of no help. I stopped running to check the situation thinking my shoe must be on wrong, but no it was fine. 10 kilometers can be quite far when both shoes feel like they are concealing a bread knife under the innersole, but there was little I could do. At the aid station I popped a bit of water in each shoe, [NEVER DO THIS] but this just converted the shoe or rather sock fabric into painful cheese grater type qualities. All of this was forgotten at around the 8km mark of the run where I totally ran out of energy. On the bike I took one energy gel thing but ate only half of it early in the 40km as the package kept scraping my knee. Now I really needed the other half. My legs felt full of concrete and a little crampy, my head felt full of helium and I had to run almost robotically for the last kilometer, just to finish. I checked behind so many times in the last 500m that running backwards would have probably proved less time consuming, but I was scared that my pace had slowed to such an extent that I was getting nowhere and my energy less state was distorting my perception of time. I crossed the line totally stuffed and was immediately presented with a microphone from the race commentator Jean Michael. I was in three minds, to either throw up on it, eat it or talk into it. I chose the latter, and gave a broken French/English account of the race that had finished nanoseconds before, that not even I could understand. Jerome had run fast to get second, just over 1 minute behind and Chris out ran Laurent to snatch third. My feet and shoes were a bit bloody, and it would take two weeks before I could wear thongs without taping my feet first. Result from race 15: 1st Lesson learned: Eat all your food