Challenge Peguera, Majorca

Lucy Dunbar sends us a post card from Majorca:

A typical Dunbar holiday this year with my parents involved partaking in Challenge Peguera in Majorca. For anyone unfamiliar with triathlon, Challenge Peguera is a half Ironman distance triathlon where you swim 1.9km, cycle 90km and then run a half marathon! Easy peasy. My dad and my partner were to do the full thing on their own and my dad decided it would be a great idea for my mum and I to form a team; me doing the run and the swim and my mum doing the bike leg!

And as a warm up to the big day, I decided to do the Challenge Peguera’s women race the night before. This was a short 4.3km race on the running route of the next day to see a bit of what the run course was like! 6 Euros to enter and a nice t-shirt too! I ended up finishing 10th out of 160 so I was happy with that!

Now onto the big race!!

Saturday morning started with clear blue skies and some very dramatic music on the beach for everybody to set off. Sadly, relay teams were last to enter the water so I had to watch the pros and then everybody else set off before starting about 15 mins later. Which meant more space to swim but also less people around if a shark happened to stop by – yes I may have a little fear of open water!

Boom! And off we ran into the water until it was deep enough to swim. And surprise surprise my goggles were leaking out of my left eye (no matter how many goggles I buy- I will always have a leaky leg eye, I think I must have a wonky face!). This made sighting a little difficult but I managed to I think roughly swim in a straight line trying to follow the very few swimmers in front of me! I finished the swim in 37.59 and made my way out the water to my mum in transition. Now it is really hard running barefoot in the sand after you have swam in the sea! My mum went off on the bike and I had a few hours to kill before the run! While I was doing so I found out that out of the relay teams, I was the first out of the female teams to be out the water – yay!!
After a few sunny hours, my mum returned on the bike and I was off onto the run. People seemed surprised how quick I was passing many on the run – little did they know my legs were only fresher as I had not done the bike! The run was 4 laps around the sea front and nearby shops. With it being 25 degrees I spent every single aid stop tipping an entire bottle of water over me just to cool down! At around mile 8, my legs started to seize. Whether it was that I hadn’t replenished electrolytes, tiredness from the night before, I don’t know but boy I haven’t known heaviness like that in anything other than marathons! I managed to just about hobble, slowing quite a lot to finish in 1 hour 48 overall.