Big Lime triathlon

I drag myself out of bed in the dark. My phone is blinking with alarms somewhere off in the room. I haven't really slept. It's like half four in the morning and I've kinda been dozing since around eleven, somewhere between dreaming and hallucinating. This sleeping experience, or lack of it, is basically the same as the last time I did a triathlon.

I pull on my t-shirt and a pair of bright orange shorts I bought earlier this year, in Florida. I'd laid them out explicitly earlier in the evening, foreseeing that my brain'd be operating at like 25% when I had to get up. My backpack is already packed. Foresight. I hoist it on and head out into Whitby, a little pre-dawn chilly.

Up the hill to where we stashed the car and I break back out over the Moors. The sun's coming up over the sea somewhere behind me. No one else is on the road. I cycle fitfully through a number of albums on my phone, trying for something familiar enough to sing, which will help me stay awake. My mouth tastes bad. My stomach is uneasy. My eyes hurt.

I get back to Wingate by and by, pick up my bicycle, check on Mo, and head back out. I'm one of the first ones to arrive at the designated registration point—the Mecca Bingo across from the McDonalds in the Hartlepool marina—despite registration being open for like 45 minutes, at that point. I wander around the car park looking for the way in: the front doors to the bingo hall are locked. Registration, it turns out, is on the other side of the building, facing a big ramshackle-looking field serving as the transition area. I register, collect my things, and haul my bike into transition. The man standing at the transition gate asks me to prove that my brakes work. Would I be here if I wasn't sure they did?

I meet up with a friend called Stephen. He's someone I know through Sam's dad and who has participated in this triathlon for a few years now. He doesn't seem impressed. I fumble with my gear and nearly walk out of transition with my running shoes on. This would have been a catastrophic error: once we've left transition, we're not allowed back in until after we complete our swim. I thank him for the heads-up.

We slide into our wetsuits. Stephen gives me some vaseline to rub around my wrists and ankles to help the wetsuit slip off faster. I don't know how to tell him that I don't expect to finish in a competitive enough time for that kind of thing to matter. I apply the vaseline anyway. The sun's coming up, and it starts to get very warm inside my wetsuit. The water in the Jackson Dock is glassy and almost totally still, deflecting the early morning sun directly into our eyes. Stephen's goggles are tinted, and also polarised. I'm very jealous: my £3 Decathlon goggles barely keep water out at the best of times.

I run into another friend from Striders and meet her husband. We share pre-race jitters and bond over the anxiety of open-water swimming. They're both in the same wave as me, so we enter the water together. I chat on a little frantically, mostly to keep my nerves down. The Wingfield Castle, a rusty old ferry from the thirties now kept as a museum ship, lurks in the background. I've always been afraid of being near big ships, I don't know why. An early experience standing next to a cruise ship in dock has put me off for life. A pair of swimmers stroke back and forth across the bow of the Wingfield Castle: my body reflexively convulses with terror. I turn away, unable to bear watching.

The starting horn goes with little notice or fanfare. I don't even realise that it's the starting horn until everyone around me suddenly takes off. I sprint, a little, to try and get ahead. Someone wraps their hand around my ankle, and then quickly lets it go. I wonder idly if it was an accident. I'll never know who it was. We round the first buoy and get the sun out of our eyes, then the second, and the third. It occurs to me well after the fact that I've crossed the channel between the docks. Last time I was here, I was being bollocked by a man in a dinghy.

Open water swimming, especially when there are buoys to sight by, becomes a sort of treadmillish spaced-out activity, after a while. There's no scenery to watch go by, really: your face is in the murky water, so all you really see is a homogenous greenish-yellowish-blue, most of the time. You watch the bubbles go by when your hand enters the water, and you catch glimpses of shoreline or dockside. Then the buoy arrives, and you twist in the water, and sight the next one, and get back to it. Stroke, breathe, stroke, breathe. Consider changing breathing sides if one arm is starting to get a bit tired.

Then I'm done, swimming well over the rubber mats laid out on the slip, swimming until my hands touch the bottom. For some reason, I instinctively look both ways before crossing the closed road on the way to transition. I run, and I only stop when I get to my bike. I pass like three people walking; I'm not sure why people get out of the water and then walk to transition, instead of running. I strip my wetsuit off and leave it in a heap on the grass. I put my helmet on, and then my shoes, and stuff some snacks in the pockets of my tri suit. One of the snacks is a pouch of electrolyte dust, meant to be mixed into your water, pre-race. I don't realise this; I think it's a gel. I grab my bike and run to the mount point.

The ride is uneventful. There's an awful headwind on the way down towards Seaton Carew, just before the turn. I suspect that I'm slowing down too much on the hairpins at either end of the long lap up and down Coronation Drive, which is hillier than I'd realised. I make good ground on the steep hills, where my bike's easy gearing makes light work. My big body and high-rolling-resistance touring tyres, however, rob my momentum on the straights. When the faster triathletes, from the first wave, pass me, their bikes make deep whooshing sounds, like fighter jets flying high overhead. More than once I suspect I'm about to be passed by a motorcycle only to be overtaken instead by a man riding an aerodynamically immaculate carbon fibre contraption and wearing a long tear-drop shaped helmet that looks ridiculous in any situation other than a full speed tuck. Maybe that's just sour grapes. I dig what I think is a gel out of my pocket, tear at it with my teeth. A bunch of electrolyte dust flies into my face. Numpty. I fold the top over and stuff it back in my pocket.

At some point in the ride, I'm passed by my friend from Striders as well; I hadn't realised I was ahead. We finish the ride nearly neck-and-neck, and I exit transition first (doing both the ride and run in the same pair of shoes), but she overtakes me again early in the run and disappears into the distance.

The lap out along the promenade is miserable. The heat of the day encroaches, the sea glitters with reflected sunlight, and that southerly wind drags on my every step. My legs are a little wobbly from the ride, unaccustomed to impact. I check my watch: I'm on pace, but just barely. No slacking.

The run does get a little easier as I go; when I turn back towards Hartlepool, with the sun and wind at my back, I pick up like ten seconds per kilometre, out of nowhere. Pleased with that, I press onwards. I pass a couple of folks on the way, picking up steam. Just over a kilometre from the finish, I check my watch and see that I've made good time. I suspect that this realisation causes me to slack, just a little bit. Come to think of it, this whole thing actually hurts quite a lot. My body would really like to stop running. I try not to give it the option. The spots on my body exposed to the wind are caked in a thin layer of salt, probably a combination of seawater and sweat. There's no shelter out on the promenade. I try to imagine getting a cool tan, getting cool tri suit tan lines. I won't be in the sun long enough. The path briefly ducks into the shade behind a block of apartments; a man is standing on his third-floor balcony and clapping for us as we make our way by.

I run directly over the middle of a roundabout, and then past a fence lined with folks cheering and looking out for their family members. I spot the finish. The announcer, calling out the names of the finishers, says, "Aaaaand number one-forty-two, coming in now, that's, uh, that's Chris Harries—or, ah, Harris, or Harries!" He's the third person this month who has, unprompted, called me Chris. The Lord Mayor of Hartlepool, his gold mayoral chain glinting, puts a medal around my neck. I finish in an hour and twenty-seven minutes.

Forgot to write weeknotes last week! I'll have to come back to em. Anyway this was a busy week. Plenty to get around to.

Elvet Striders

One of the things I neglected to write about last week was that I joined Elvet Striders, a running club in Durham. I've never been part of a running club before, but I've gotten bored and frustrated running the same routes round Wingate on my own—so here I am. I attended my first training session with them (riding down on the YBR) on Monday—an interval session on the track at Maiden Castle. Track running is... different! It's a significantly more mental game; breaking your run down into segments (the curve, the straight, the finish line, individual laps) helps you get out of your head and right into the business of spinning your legs and breathing. Keen to take what I've learned back onto the railway paths around our house.

Middlesbrough FE

On Wednesday, I attended Middlesbrough Front End, a small web development conference held in (you guessed it) Middlesbrough. Locals will tell you that Middlesbrough is rubbish but I've never had a bad experience there.

This year's conference was held in the basement of the Town Hall, in a big old iron-girder-ed single room, with the speakers at the front and assorted catering at the back. A lot of conferences of this size and cost tend towards the homegrown: local speakers presenting some kind of web-dev-adjacent case study to plug their digital marketing agencies, one-man-bands logging into their clients' admin panels to update WordPress live.

Middlesbrough Front End was categorically not this kind of experience. The MCs were genial and enthusiastic, the speakers were high-profile and came with exciting talks that I (mostly) hadn't seen before, and the conference was well-paced, with plenty of opportunity to chat with the speakers and with other attendees. The only other conference of this sort that I'd been to was State of the Browser back in 2022, and while that was a lovely trip, this had such a better sense of community and togetherness. They made the decision to re-attend next year a no-brainer.

Stray observation: the post-conference social introduced me to another one of Boro's gems: Play Brew, a craft brewery-slash-taproom in an industrial estate by the A66. I thought you only got little homegrown spots like that in big cities. Up the Boro &c &c.

Bicycle tune-up

Late last week, I brought my bike (the pedal one, the Dawes Galaxy) over to a neighbour of ours who looks after bikes to investigate a clicky bottom bracket. It turns out that the bracket itself was shot, the bearings totally worn down and bound to seize one of these days. Over the weekend he swapped those bearings out & lo & behold: no clicking. Pleased, I returned the bike to him earlier in the week for a full go-over and tune-up.

When I retrieved it on Thursday, I found that he'd not only re-torqued all of the bolts, replaced the cables, un-bent the derailleur hanger, re-indexed the shifters, trued and dished the wheels, adjusted spoke tension, and replaced a seized front brake—but that he'd taken just about every unscrewable component off the bike and put it through his parts cleaner. The bike gleamed. The chrome shimmered in the sun. The derailleur clicked back and forth with verve and alacrity. The frame (scuffs and scratches aside) looked brand-spanking. In a high gear, the chain sang. The bike oozed strength and character. I was gobsmacked. But I was well pleased, since I had ample opportunity to open it up on the road as the weekend approached.

Castle Howard triathlon

Friday afternoon we packed the bike into the car with weekend supplies and raced down to Castle Howard for an open-water swimming orientation class at Castle Howard, south of the North York Moors. A long-awaited weekend had arrived: I was participating in a triathlon.

Orientation was straightforward but helpful: a quick introduction to getting into and out of a wetsuit, acclimatisation techniques for cold-water swimming, sighting, and a tour of the transition area. The instructor was helpful but dawdled a little bit, and I had to drop off early to check into the lovely Burythorpe House for dinner and a stay the night before the race itself. A wonderful steak dinner and a couple pints of dark, room-temperature beer would prove ample pre-tri nutrition.

I struggled to get more than a light doze the night before the race. Nerves kept me half-awake, half-hallucinating race scenarios as the summer sun rose at like 5 am. I woke and scarfed a light breakfast of porridge before checking out and hurrying down to Castle Howard for registration. A thin drizzle soaked slowly through our clothes as we waited for my wave to be called (Wave 4, the last (and slowest) wave of the sprint-distance triathloners).

When I was called, I stickered up my (gleaming) bike and made my way into transition. Changed out of jeans and hoodie and into my wetsuit and swimming cap, double-checking that my shoes and race belt (with bib attached) were easily accessible for when I made my way back up the hill after the swim, and did a couple laps of transition to try and warm up. Hands clammy and shivering faintly with nerves, I followed the rest of Wave 4 down the hill to the boathouse by the lake.

We were briefed and then it was into the lake with us, yellow swim caps bobbing in the muddy water. Afloat with 50 others, you don't see much on the water, eyes only a few centimetres above the surface. Underwater, I saw even less: a hundred bare feet had stirred up the slurry at the bottom of the lake and made even my hands ahead of me invisible through the murk.

Before I knew it they were calling fifteen seconds, and then five. Then the race was on. I swam a few strokes of head-up front crawl and tried to navigate around my competitors, but couldn't find a rhythm. Whenever I tried to get my head down I'd drift into someone or start wandering in the right direction; without a black line on the floor it's hard to swim in a straight line. I'd get my head up to sight and lose track of my breathing and start sputtering in the loose surf. I swam over a number of anonymous legs.

By the 100m buoy the pack started to thin out. Passing another swimmer, I found myself with a bit of a gap ahead, and got down to business. Before too long, I'd arrived at the turn-around point, and after a brief mixup with which buoys to swim between and which to swim around, I was on my way back to the shore. Near the shore I passed one more swimmer and caught a mouthful of dredged-up lake slurry, and then clambered through the muck onto the boardwalk and up the hill towards the transition area.

I peeled my wetsuit off as I hiked it up the hill to transition, passing a couple of competitors on the way. My kit was soaked in the strengthening drizzle, but I threw on my shoes sockless and starting running my bike towards the road. Into the saddle and legs pumping into the wind: I was off. I'd practiced the ride a few weeks earlier so knew what to expect, but my neighbour's handiwork made the bike a pleasure to ride through the windy, drizzly countryside. Shifting immaculately as the rolling hills came and went, I passed other riders on the climbs, and was re-passed on the descents. No doubt my big unaerodynamic trunk on my big upright frame was to blame.

Not much to report from the ride; it was soon over and I was out onto two laps of trails through Ray Wood. Running is probably my strongest discipline, but after 80 minutes of all-out pushing, I could barely manage a hobble for the first lap. When I came upon a bloke I'd met the night before at orientation, I couldn't help but give him a cheery "Well done!" and a bit of beta for the course ahead. Soon the two laps were over and I was trundling down the last drop towards the castle, making a right turn onto the last straight and over the line. I was garlanded with a heavy medal and directed to a tent with more gummies and bananas than I could possibly eat in a lifetime.

The event wasn't without its tragedy, however: somewhere along the course, my wedding ring came off my finger and was lost. I avail-lessly retraced my steps up the hill from the swim to transition, and scoured the transition zone. It wasn't a particularly fancy wedding ring, nor an expensive one, nor handed down through the family—it's not the physical ring I was attached to, but the fact of wearing it, that I'm proud of. Missing it from my finger makes me feel awful.

Meeting folks

I think I've met more new people in the past couple of weeks than I had in the three years leading up to COVID. I'm talking real-life people, as opposed to the faces in squares that show up on my computer screen to talk shop on a daily basis.

But I'm rediscovering the joy of chat with people about whatever's going on, or what they did on the weekend, or what they've got planned, or about common interests, like bicycles or running or web development or being nervous about doing a triathlon. This simple pleasure is probably very obvious to a lot of people, but I'd sort of lost track of it over COVID, when the only person I really had to talk to was Sam. Sam's a really wonderful person, and I'd still count myself lucky if she was the only person I could talk to for the rest of my life—but getting to know people, and just chatting, is returning to me a sort of excitement in people that I'd forgotten.

Trying something new this week. Inspired by Phil Gyford's weeknotes, I'm writing some of my own. I got into a good swing of monthnotes last year, but for some reason I've found it hard to build a rhythm in 2023. It feels like each month is too jam-packed with stuff to write about, and so inevitably I waffle and procrastinate until we're two weeks into the following month and the previous has been all but forgotten.

So I'm breaking it down into weeks. We'll see how I get on.

This week was quiet round our end, plenty of time spent with Ghyll in the evenings. We've had an uncommon run of nice weather—great big puffy clouds scattered across vivid blue skies and the thermometer hovering around twenty degrees—so I've taken Ghyll out for a few walks to a nearby field for a run around. He always comes back foaming at the mouth and panting his heart out. And then he sleeps well.

Not to say that we haven't had a bit of rain, though—and all the attendant allergies rainy weather entails. I'm useless on the first (and sometimes second!) sunny day(s) after a spell of rain, wheezing continually into a soggy handkerchief and squinting at the computer screen through itchy eyes. When I try to explain this to people, I feel like I'm astrologising: "No, it was sunny yesterday, and then the rain fell last night, and we've had a bit of wind, and the moon's waning... atchoo." As much as the dust was annoying during a dry spell earlier in the summer, I think this is annoying me more. Good for the plants, though.

Sam prompted me late last week to start training in earnest for my triathlon at the end of July, so this was my first full week of Serious Training. You might say that's a bit late—and I would too!—but I have been doing sort of triathlon-adjacent running and cycling for the past few months now. I think I'm in decent shape. The training plan that Sam has subscribed me to has taken it out of me, though. Only got a single (blessed) day of rest this week; difficulty sleeping has not made it any easier. Here's hoping that it gets easier over the coming weeks; if not, well, pain is temporary etc etc.

Sam spent most of Friday cooking up some goodies (quiches, breads, rolls) to sell at the church fair that St. Luke’s held on Saturday afternoon. The baked goods sold well (thanks in small part to my own zealous cake-eating); Sam’s disappeared almost instantly. I’ve heard tell of people who come to the St. Luke’s fairs exclusively to pick up one of her famous quiches lorraine. It was nice to catch up with folks I hadn’t seen in a few months, too; though when asked how I’d been and what I’d been up to, I struggled to come up with an answer. I don’t want to be the kind of person whose go-to is “work has been busy,” but what have I been doing for the past few months? Going out for runs? I guess I cycled the C2C back in May—and we went to the States. I’ll lead with that next time.

Afterwards, I took my first open-water dip in the UK in the Hartlepool marina. I'd swum in lakes back in Canada before, but almost exclusively on calm days at the end of summer when the lake'd be nice and warm and the sun would heat the top 10 cm of water to bathtub temps. Nothing quite as choppy as the marina turned out to be in a high wind. About halfway across the channel between two docks, a group on a dinghy came sailing up to me and told me that I wasn't permitted to swim in the marina. Strava's Global Heatmap misleading me again!—oh well, I paddled over to one of the ladders and climbed out. I must have been a bit of a sight to the locals in the marinaside beer gardens: some soggy, bearded Canadian crawling up out of the waves and wandering off down the promenade. Defeated, I stripped out of my wetsuit and ran a contrite 6k down to Seaton Carew and back, making good time in defiance of Hartlepudlians giving me the ol' up-down-up in my skintight triathlon suit. A long shower and a couple beers in the evening put me back to rights.

Woke up Sunday to a high wind, regretting a promise I made to a buddy of mine to head up to Newcastle for a bit of running. I struggled to get out of bed and strongly considered being an absolute flake, but with some effort managed to pull together my running gear. Then I grabbed my backpack, my boots, jacket, and helmet, because I was back out on the motorbike for a ride up to the Toon—that's right, I'm back on the YBR after my catastrophic encounter with a roundabout last November. It was easier than I remembered it being! I think that, in some lizard-brain-type way, I'm mentally readier for the speed and the full-body way that you operate a motorbike, after riding my bicycle so far over the wintertime. Bombing down Bargate Bank into Lanchester going 65 kph in the slipstream of some Vauxhall Insignia with nothing but a juddering steel frame under you really girds the loins, it turns out.

Anyway, my friend in Newcastle talked me into an impromptu half-marathon through Gosforth and Heaton and back across the Town Moor, under a sky threatening at times both sunburn and a solid soaking. We did a good job of keeping a steady pace, and Strava reckons that I broke my PB in the half-marathon. Given that we didn't get rained on in the end, I reckon that's a decent result. I never thought I'd be the sort of person able to wake up early and knock out a half-marathon and then get on with the rest of my day, but here I am. Quietly proud of myself.

When I was but a wee lad in the back of my family's 1997 Chevrolet Suburban and we were living in Montreal, the worst part of my week would be our weekly swimming lessons in Pointe-Claire. These were family-mandated. I wasn't much of a sporty kid: I didn't go out for hockey in winter, was maybe less-than-mediocre at soccer, which my dad coached in the summertime. I developed a weirdly intense enthusiasm for rollerblading that lasted only a couple of years. But when I think of childhood sports, I think of swimming.

I think of Pointe-Claire's strange tent-shaped pool building; think of the high-up plexiglas windows lining the gable that you'd only notice when doing the backstroke. I think of those timing clocks with four hands in different colours. I think of graduating to the grown-up pool within after getting my bronze badge. I think of the badges! I wonder what happened to those.

The funny thing is: looking back on all of those Wednesday nights, driving home in the midwinter darkness, under the orange glow of those high-pressure sodium streetlights which have lately all been swapped out for high-efficiency LEDs, I'm proud of myself. I've never felt ungainly in the water, swimming out to the island on Lake Sir John or to Pooh-sticks bridge, in the waves on the beach. I know I'm privileged to have been able to attend swim lessons—I recognise that privilege and I'm grateful for it. My parents were right. I do appreciate those swim lessons that I dreaded back then.

I've got a swim membership at the Mill House Leisure Centre in Hartlepool now; I've gotta get back on track if I have any intention of finishing my sprint triathlon later this summer in good time. It feels good to be back in the water. Hartlepool keeps their pool a lot warmer than Pointe-Claire did. But the heating cranked up in the changing rooms, the smell of chlorine, the black stripe on the bottom cutting through the vivid blue of the bottom of the pool, soothes me—even while I gasp between strokes on the front crawl. Swimming feels like wearing an old piece of clothing that still fits. Like the smell of an old house. I missed it without knowing it.