Month: July 2017

London Triathlon 2017

As I mentioned in the last post, I did the London Triathlon at the weekend. I got round in a total time of 2:40:33 which is 3min quicker than WTS even in Leeds I did about a month ago. I’m slowly working my way back towards the sub 2:30:00 times I managed in 2015.

The weather forecast changed all week but always with rain at some point in the day, early on it looked like it might stay dry until at least the run, but this was dashed when I got properly soaked while riding from Leytonstone down to Excel before the start.

As usual The London Triathlon runs a number of different courses over the weekend, I was racing the “shortest” loop version of the Olympic distance which was made up a 2 lap swim, 4 lap bike and a 4 lap run.

The “long” loop version on Sunday morning is a 1 lap swim and a 1.5 lap bike (down to Parliament and back) and a 3 lap run which I’ve done a couple of times before.

Swim

There was a break in the rain just in time for the start of the swim

The 2 lap swim has it’s good and bad points over the 1 lap version

  • good: you can see the between all the turning buoys. For the 1 lap version you can’t see the first buoy from the start line.
  • bad: Waves set off in 2 halves with 2 mins between halves and 20mins between waves, which means that as you start your pretty much straight into the back of the mid pace swimmers from the wave before on their second lap. Also with the shorter legs the waves don’t spread out as much so the was a lot more bumping and jostling all the way round and especially at the run in to the exit.

Ride

By the time I was out of the water and on to the bike the rain had well and truly kicked back in. The course was a 10k loop between 2 roundabouts, but the turns were the short way round the which made them very tight, this combined with a little technical section just west of Excel made for some treacherous areas. The course was pretty much pan flat except the climb over the flyover just before the first turn. I averaged 30kph, over the 40km which is OK considering how wet it was.

Run

It stopped raining again for the run which is again nearly totally flat, apart from the climb up into the Excel each lap to pass the turn to the
finish straight. The indoor loop was a bit longer this year.

The new Garmin 935 worked really well, the triathlon mode is very similar to the 910XT with the lap button being used to move between disciplines. One feature that I think is new is the ability to set the auto button lock on a per activity basis, I used this to lock the buttons for the openwater swim. I did this because unlike the 910XT the the start/stop and lap button are on the right hand edge of the watch and as I wear my watch on my right wrist this put the buttons up against the edge of my wetsuit so I was a little worried they might get push by accident. This just meant I had to press and hold one of the buttons when I got out of the water to unlock things before pressing the lap button to signal entering T1.

Garmin Forerunner 935

My trusty Garmin Forerunner 910xt has finally been put out to pasture, 2 years ago the barometric altimeter failed and I got it replaced with a refurbed version and over the last 3 months the power button has been getting harder and harder to push. My best guess is that the micro switch has lifted off of the board so it needs to be push at just the right angle to get it to line up with the contacts and actually activate.

My Fitbit HR had also given up the ghost as well in the last few months so I went looking for a replacement that would cover for both. I looked at both the Garmin 735 and the 935. Both do step counting and have a optical HR sensor in the back. Reviews of the HR sensor on the 735 were not so great and it was missing a barometric altimeter so that didn’t help it’s case. Wiggle were also doing a week of extra discount (17%) at the time as well which helped to bring the price of the 935 down to something slightly more sensible than list price.

So as you can guess by the title of this post I opted for the 935. It arrived this morning so I don’t have a lot to say about it just yet, but the first impressions are:

Garmin forerunner 935
Garmin forerunner 935
  • It’s a lot smaller than the 910xt and even a bit smaller than the Suunto Vector that I have been wearing as a day to day watch
  • It’s also lighter than I expected, I’m used to wearing something with a bit of heft (My first serious sailing watch was a Citizen Yatchmaster which was stainless steel, when I took it off my arm used to float) to it so this it will take a day or two to get used to how light it is.

A lot of the features need a bit of time to learn my training pattern and my day to day activity profile so I’ll give it a week to bed in and write some more about it, I’m also doing the London Tri next weekend so that will be a good chance to give it a proper workout.

Both the 735 and the 935 both support the 2 new HRM belts from Garmin that support recording HR data while swimming (the HRM-Tri and HRM-Swim), while I already have a ant+ HRM belt I’m seriously tempted by both of these (mainly for the geekiness) so I may have to grab one or both soon.