We have arrived in Bratislava. It is currently a toasty 29 degrees. The water temperature was up to 18.2degrees today with the wetsuit-prohibiting-22 looming large.
BA managed to transfer Tamarah's bag between flights at Heathrow but mine didn't make it. Being BA though, they had it on the next flight and delivered to the hotel less than an hour after we arrived.
So the main point of coming all this way is to race the ETU European Aquathlon Championships. A 1,000m swim followed by a 5,000m run and my first outing in a GB age-group select team. I have already succeeded in my main goal which was to qualify for a race at this level and earn the GB try-suit with my name on it.
If I was to have the race of my life then I would be looking at a 16 minute swim, about a minute through transition, and a 19 minute 5K. That will get me home in 36 minutes. That would put me in the middle of the field for my age-group, hopefully well inside the top-10.
A safe conservative target would be 17+1+20 = 38 mins. That might still sneak me in to the top-10 depending on other athletes. That would still be a minute or two under what I had predicted at the start of the year.
I am predicting those times without having seen the course. The map looks dead flat so the run should be fast. The course manual says 5X1km laps, there is apparently some ongoing discussion about it changing to 3x1-mile laps instead. The lake looks to be a simple, single lap route and with 100+ younger, international swimmers towing me along I should be out of the water in a decent time. I might come back and amend this entire post once I have seen the course.
And you can add a minute to all those swim predictions if, as is looking ever more likely, the water gets to a temperature where I can't wear my wetsuit. That hurts me more than the pure swimmers but less than the pure runners so might make no difference at all to my eventual placing.
Anyway, I am here, I am in as good a shape as I could have hoped for, and I am ready to go on Saturday morning.
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