We arrived to Aarau, Switzerland on Friday morning and got all soaked up in the excitement and atmosphere of Gigathlon 2015 – I wrote about it in the previous post. We went to bed (well in the sleeping bag) relatively early, I only opened one eye when Klárka got up at 5 am to get ready for her 8 am mountain bike start. Got up around 7:30 to watch the mass start. 600 mountain bikes were really massive. The single and couple competitors already started at 6 am.
What was on the schedule for Day 1 of Gigathlon 2015?
- Mountain bike (Klára): 39 km, 1 180 m elevation gain
- Swimming (Petr M.): 9 km (in the current, so “reality” was something around 4,8 km – crazy distance anyway!)
- In-line skating (Petr L.): 31 km, 250 m elevation gain
- Running (Barborka 🙂 ): 18 km, 670 m elevation gain
- Road bike (Pavel): 96 km, 1 950 m elevation gain
We have young and promising MTB athlete Klára in our team, unfortunately the danger of mass start hit her, someone bumped in her from back and twisted part of her gear shifter, so she had to repair it by herself and only finished her leg on 5 gears 🙁 Advantage was that we were passing our competitors all the way to the finish of day 1. Pavel and me had pretty long day as we were only starting around noon (me) and 2 pm (Pavel).
Nutrition prep – UCAN for hours 😀 I don’t like starting later in the day as fueling becomes difficult.
Saturday running route … just three little climbs 😀
And the elevation chart did not lie – my Garmin did match it quite well!
Average 170 BPM & 180 BPM maximum heart rate.
I walked all the steep uphills to keep my heart rate lower and be able to run fast immediately from the top. I think this strategy worked well. I walked faster than some people running the uphills and I passed 95 % of those who overtook me on the the uphills. I finished in 1:40:59 (1:40:14 according to my Garmin), happy with the effort! Resulted in 146th time for my leg on Day 1 out of almost 600 people in the Team of Five competition.
The transition area was in this beautiful amphitheatre.
I ran pretty much wrapped in Royal Bay compression gear 😀 The thigh extreme sleeves are great to protect your thigh muscles on downhills! Get my discount code for Royal Bay shop.
Our team recovering from Day 1 effort, compexing my legs 🙂
Fro Yo treat!!!
Pavel finishing our Day 1 effort – he got seriously overheated and still finished with 52nd time out of 564 teams that started!
With Pavel just after he finished… he is trying hard to look OK, but you can see the effort in his face. Great job!
Přemek from the Czech couple team finishing!
Eating dinner 😀
Evening recovery swim in the river was great!
Even one day was great experience and very tough race. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel racing next day half marathon distance with elevation again!
