Triathlon

I know what a triathlon is, a three event race of swimming, biking and running, but I had never been very much interested before. I was passing through the sitting room after making some chicken soup and on the way to do some writing, and sat down with a cup of tea and the TV happened to be showing the World series Triathlon from Stockholm. As I sat down the swimmers dived in and of they went, through the choppy waters in Stockholm. There were great views of the city from the camera boat as it followed the swimmers. It was a little difficult to be excited at the anonymous bobbing heads but the swimmers were going at a tremendous pace, with one of them really racing ahead. They had to go round some big inflatable yellow buoys halfway along the course and they had to keep lifting their heads as they swam to make sure they were taking the shortest distance back to land where they would begin their cycling. I was wondering how they would get out of the water onto the blue floating pontoon, but there were inflatable steps and they rushed up them hardly breaking stride. I don’t know anything about who is big in the triathlon world but I did recognize the name Brownlee… two British athletes are the Brownlee brothers, Jonny and Alistair… I knew they rode bikes but didn’t realise they were triathletes. Anyway, they hopped on their bikes after struggling out of their wet-suits, pulling in their helmets. They zoomed away and were soon well in the lead… 17 seconds ahead, 31 seconds ahead, 51 seconds ahead… the pack were way behind and when it came to the bike to running transition there was no way anyone could catch the brothers. Now it was a full on race between Alistair the older and Jonathon the younger… Jonny had not won any of the stages in this world event and this penultimate race gave him the chance… and he took it and beat his brother. Hurrah!

I really enjoyed watching the race and will deinfitel try to see the final in Edmonton, Canada – on TV, I can’t actually go there! The other cities in the series were Auckland,Cape Town , Yokohama, London, , Chicago and Hamburg. There are various different categories of race, with varying distances; the world series I think is the sprint, 750-meter (0.47-mile) swim, 20-kilometre (12-mile) bike, and 5-kilometre (3.1-mile) run. Good heavens… I could swim that far, cycle that far… but run? No chance!