Rollin' on the River to the Rollason - Birmingham Triathlon 2018 Part 1

The longest and most fun weekend of 2018 so far kicked off yesterday afternoon as I left work at 1pm to drive to the Midlands to get settled in for the Birmingham Sprint Triathlon. I originally picked the Shropshire event in September but after a clash with work commitments the organisers agreed to let me move my entry to the UK’s second biggest city. 2018 has been a season of up, up and up again ever since winning the 7/70 at Stadt Moers Park; although I wasn’t to know it at the time, it was the last race I ever ran as an omnivore. Instead I was getting accustomed to eating more, being more ethically conscious and enjoying the vegan life and it was with 4kg less on my frame (chassis) than the day of the 7/70 that I bolted out of Birkenhead to begin Part 1: the Long Trip South.

The first port of call was to do my near-daily blag of a free coffee, in this case a soya latte, at Waitrose in Chester. What a right royal farce this was; I did enjoy the falafel (Salahfel) wrap and the lattes they serve are lush, but some customers, honestly, where do I start? One suddenly realised upon reaching the till that they could actually get food in there (hello it’s a café) and another one who talked as though he was associated with one of the local bike shops (and I think I recognised him) was extremely disappointed not to get some full-fat dairy milk for his tea. Because obviously there are no bigger problems in his life, obviously………I let the lovely lunch slide down while thinking what a bunch of losers I’d left behind on the race to get to the only clean table in the café, before leaving Chester, heading down the A483/A5 through North Wales to rejoin the motorways at the M54 near Telford. On the way I crossed the River Severn and got stuck behind more than one caravan but luckily with lots of straight lines and not many tricky corners, they were in their element, a bit like someone who enjoys fast race venues, I wonder who he is……….Anyway, I passed a few construction sites in Telford, home of a particularly fast 10k every December, and found myself following the signs for the M6 before too long, turning off onto the A34 for Erdington and Sutton Park.

When I arrived I wanted to drive the bike course but once you got to the ice-cream van you couldn’t get past the first gate. So I simply went down to the water’s edge and couldn’t help but notice the presence of a horde of cows who looked every bit as wild and menacing as the wildlife now found in Chernobyl. Apparently they can’t be controlled and as someone with a deep sense of ethics I applaud such values, but they would play quite a role the following day; more on that in Part 2. For now I was busy trying to find Paddy Lee, my St Helens Tri teammate who was in the area for the weekend as his son is in Wolverhampton, and then made my way back across the roundabout I came in on to head straight for the Rollason hotel.

The clock was now well past the 5pm mark and I was conscious of the need to get something to eat before turning in for the night but the first thing I noticed when I got there was just how warm the place was; how people were walking round the place in jackets I have no idea, I know I’m the one who needs to pack three tank tops including my new “Align” one from JD Sports which reminds me a bit of the Avicii logo) but I got even more of a shock when I reached the second floor having battled with a flight of stairs big enough for size 4.5 feet. Or was 4.5 the over/under for total goals in the England game the following day? We wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. Upon reaching my room I couldn’t help but notice just what an oven it was, and worse still only one window would even slightly open. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to dragging a suspect left leg down the stairs the following morning. So I decided to make as few trips as possible up and down the stairs and go about acquiring some calories from whichever vegan source possible. I considered finding the Verdo Lounge a few miles down the road but I also wanted to catch up on the World Cup. It was here that I made a particularly important decision with regards to carb loading for the following day.

So far I’ve been fairly critical of the hotel but they did allow me to park J-Lo the Jaguar in the kitchen, and another thing I really liked was that they have a takeaway directory allowing you to choose pretty much whichever cuisine you want, so it was a case of “pick reliably but gets lots of energy in the system”. In the GP Rejects 2018 season preview they compared every Formula 1 team to a curry, and the four-time world champions Mercedes (the car most similar to me in a race, a rocket in a straight line but doesn’t like being thrown off balance) were compared to a biryani; it’s not often you get a memorable one, but it’s always a consistently tasty choice. So I made my way down to Imtiaz Indian restaurant and ordered one. Of course, I could have sat in with there being more staff than customers on a slow Saturday night but in the end the option of takeaway plus Germany-Sweden won out and what a good decision it turned out to be, as I grabbed two plates from the kitchen inventory and enjoyed a vegan biryani and a bit of fruit to properly energise me, while I also drained half of the litre-strong Arbonne bottle I’ve picked up as part of the first package of energy products I have available to order. In other words, use Matt’s spectacular N-Fuse at the start of your Ironman, then when the free bottles are handed out top up with one of my fizz sticks! Job done. Speaking of getting the job done, what a match it was; Sweden could have finished the world champions off by half-time but it was quickly back to 1-1 and when that free-kick was awarded in the 95^th minute, somehow you just knew that Toni Kroos would give us all the “here we go” moment of the weekend by keeping the world champions in the competition. The irony of where my Focus bike comes from wasn’t lost on me either; a last minute winner to keep your hopes alive, would that be a portent of things to come the next day?

Here’s the first page of results, in association with Imtiaz Indian Restaurant:

Distance: about 100 miles

Time: about 2.5 hours

Average Speed: faster than a running cow even on the M6

Caravans: 3

Ice Cream Vans: 1 but no dairy required here

Pre Race Nutrition: 10/10 (Vegan biryani and fruit plus 500ml from the Arbonne bottle)

And so it was lights out time at 10pm. Turn to part 2 for the race itself. It was time to “do a Germany” and make history……….