Did Keswick Conquer Me?

Back when global pandemics were the stuff of movies, I entered a sprint triathlon due to take place in May 2020 at the Keswick Mountain Festival. It ended up deferred a year but then due to a second lockdown was moved again to September. This meant that what was intended to be a “warm up” for LakesMan half, was now going to take place at the end of the season and three months after my “A Race”.

In a moment of misplaced enthusiasm I upgraded my entry from the sprint triathlon to the “Keswick Conqueror”. What is the Keswick Conqueror? I hear you ask. It’s a 100km triathlon with a difference….. the swim is a straight forward enough 3.6km point to point swim in Derwentwater followed by (plot twist!) a 25km trail run and the 72km bike leg takes place the following day.

There is a reason for this (aside from the three legs also being individual events), the run has over 700m of ascent and the ride goes over three of the Lake Districts notorious passes, one of them in both directions and in total has 1,400m of ascent. Cue cries of “are you mad?” from my triathlete friends.

Race day 1…..

The weather forecast was reasonably ok, with only a light westerly breeze which meant that as the swim was along the western side of the lake we were sheltered behind Catbells. Being taken to the start line wet suited up in a motorboat was pretty surreal and there were nervous jokes about the Normandy landings and starting the race “Nordic Man style”. This was the point the organisers chose to tell us about the jetty being damaged and the 700m walk to the start …… luckily I must have had a premonition and had worn £1 Primark flip flops which saved my feet!

The swim itself was pretty uneventful other than I managed to make good use of the draft from passing swimmers to pull my fastest ever open water swim out of the bag!

T2 was a leisurely walk to the car, change into dry kit and time for a pulled pork roll from a street food stall in the festival village before my run start wave.

Now, I used the term “trail race” loosely because the first 7/8km was along the side of a crag. The path was twisting and barely two feet wide, with shrubbery taller than me, unexpected rock steps and a drop off to one side. Oh yes, and dog walkers coming from the opposite direction! The middle section consisted of a 1km vertical ascent up Watlendeth and a 1km vertical descent down into Rosthwaite village where there is a 3hr cutoff… I was well under at around 1:30 though.

The sun came out for the last 14km which was a pretty standard trail run and I even managed a smile for the camera at the finish.

Race day 2…..

Oh boy, my glutes know we ran up a fell yesterday!

Living on the doorstep I’d been practising the route and knew that two of the climbs I could comfortably do, one I had only managed once the previous week and the other I’d never managed to successfully ride all the way up at all.

Climb 1 Honister from Seathwaite – as expected I hit the wall at the steepest (27%) point and had to get off and push about 100 yards… but so did 80% of the field.

Climb 2 (Newlands 25%) and climb 3 (Whinlatter 20%) were uneventful steady spins with another smile for the camera at the top of Newlands.

Climb 4 (Honister reverse 25%) with three preceding passes and yesterday’s run in my legs it was always going to be a big ask and for the second time that day I had to push 100 yards.

The best part of all these passes though? What goes up must come down….. WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

The result……

Because the three legs can be entered individually, the ride is classified as a sportive and in order to “discourage” racing on the steep passes the time is excluded from the final tri result; disappointing as it’s my strongest discipline! But a friend who is a spreadsheet whizz has analysed the results and declared that had this been a “true triathlon”, over the three disciplines I finished third female overall, so we’re taking that!

Epic Swimming

Like the majority of triathletes swimming is not my forte, it is however (bizarrely) my favourite discipline.

I’ve always loved it even as a child and teenager, but front crawl I’ve never been able to master. For years I’ve happily bobbed along doing breaststroke but after the epic fail of LakesMan 2019 I decided I needed to spend winter in the pool learning front crawl in order to swim faster and more efficiently.

It would be fair to say that in the beginning I sucked big time and it’s no exaggeration when I say that I couldn’t even do one length of a 25m pool. But armed with hours of YouTube in my brain I eventually did one length front crawl (followed by one length breaststroke) which soon became two, became four and so on. In October 2019 I swam my first half mile in a snail like 43 minutes (4:54/100m), followed by my first 1,900m in December in a time of 1:13 (3:47/100m) which would have been outside the LakesMan cut off.

It’s been a labour of love and I’m not ashamed to admit that on at least one occasion on a dark winter morning in early 2020 I cried in the pool.

When Boris closed the pools and LakesMan was cancelled I took to the lakes; determined to come out of lockdown swim fit. I even swam through winter and between May 2020 and May 2021 I’d done something like 71 open water swims.

I’m extremely harsh on myself when I don’t see improvements in my swimming and I often have to remind myself how far I’ve come.

So I decided to enter all four Epic swim events this year, not only because the medals tend to be very snazzy but because I needed to prove to myself that I belonged on the start line in order to get rid of the imposter syndrome I felt around other swimmers.

The events are a month apart starting with in Ulswater in June, followed by Derwentwater in July, Coniston in August and Windermere in September. Each event has the option of 500m, 1 mile or 3.8km; the exception is the season finisher at Windermere which is a whopping 5km. Obviously I entered the long ones!

On the most part they were relatively uneventful, Ulswater was cold at 12 degrees and Coniston windy resulting in a technique known as “wide feet” in order to stay right side up.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about Windermere 5km. I’d never swam more than 4.2km and that was done at a leisurely stop start intermittent front crawl/breaststroke/bob about with friends type pace. The temperature in the Cumbrian lakes had steadily dropped in the preceding week which only added to the tension.

15 minutes before the start I put my finger through my wetsuit and split one leg along the seam, luckily the guy on the nearby burger van had gaffer tape so crisis was averted!

The conditions were perfect and water temperature 17/18 which is my ideal range.

I went out at slightly below normal “race pace” determined to keep something in the tank and not run out of steam: I think I even managed negative splits on the last few hundred metres!

I absolutely loved every minute and can honestly say it’s up there among my proudest achievements; I learned to swim, I swam 5km and it was EPIC!