Dealing With Cold Swim Starts, Smart Trainers vs Gym Bikes, and Tips for Racing IRONMAN Leeds in the Heat | Ep 603

I know there are a lot of people attempting Ironman UK this weekend.

As I, as I go to record, it's gonna be Ironman UK in Leeds this weekend on the 16th of August.

So if you're listening in real time, as it were, you'll be hearing this before Ironman UK goes out.

Maybe you're listening in the future and it'll already have happened.

But I do follow along on the, the Ironman UK Facebook groups, and it's really interesting to read.

There's a, there's an awful lot of people very, very anxious about that race.

And perhaps understandably, it's a very, very challenging bike course.

Um, there's not a lot of free speed there.

The bike course I think has somewhere in the region of 2,500 meters of climbing in.

The roads are not fast, the roads are not smooth, although I have seen some great photos of places where they have done some good resurfacing in places.

So that's really good for the athletes taking part.

But there's a lot of turns, there's a few dead turns, there's a lot of really steep hills, and that means the same athlete at the same fitness is possibly gonna be an hour slower on the Ironman UK bike course than they might be on one of the faster courses like Challenge Rot or Austria or Germany.

So you have to be prepared for that.

Be prepared to know that, you know, you are gonna be out there for longer than you probably might expect to be on one of the faster courses.

So that'd be a real tip from me for a first-timer is not to compare yourself and your bike times and your fitness with an athlete who might be similar to you in training but might have gone over to do one of those faster events, 'cause the two are just not comparable at all.

So you'll have to pace yourself.

The fact you can expect to be out there for a, a much longer time on the bike than perhaps some of the faster European courses might suggest.

That's my first tip for you.

The second tip is sitting here now looking at the, the medium-range weather forecast, we're entering another really hot spell in the UK.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday this week are predicted to be over 30 degree centigrade, so into the mid-90s Fahrenheit with high humidity.

So it's going to be really unpleasantly hot for the next week or so.

It looks like that might break a little bit before the weekend, and the forecast I've recently checked this morning shows it getting much, much cooler on Monday after the race with possibilities of rain.

So there's a chance that that weather might break before race day.

There's a chance that that weather might actually break on race day if people are unlucky and, and obviously we don't want people getting rained on on race day.

But I think the bigger challenge is going out and racing in the heat.