Tri, tri and tri again

We have had a lot of triathletes in the club over the past twenty five years or so - Jim Shields was the top man with his GB selections, Michael Diver and Prasad Prasad both had their moments in both triathlons and duathlons too but the main man just now seems to be Cliff Brown. Last weekend he was at the Mid Argyll Sprint Tri. Hwe started off in the fast heat of the swim and was only seven seconds down on the winner and dropped a couple of places on the Bike ride. The run was not a good one unfortunately - he had been working hard on the swimming and cycling parts of the event and the running maybe suffered a bit because of that as well as because of his continuing problem with tight calf and hamstrings. Nevertheless his time of 1:18 overall was better than the winning time the past two years but this year only placed him fourth V50. The tight hamstrings is interesting because it seems to be a West of Scotland problem in that lots of athletes have terrible problems with hamstring injuries and the Royal Scottish Ballet is said to drop more young dancers because of this problem than for any other reason. Runners with any pretence at injury free running should really do proper warm ups for this part of the body and even wear tights for training runs in bad weather.
However his season has been a good one with improvements in swimming and cycling with only the runing being a problem. The cure is - more running! You don't need to be a witch-doctor to work that one out!!! How about the short relays Cliff? Dave will show you the ropes and maybe we'll have a father/son act in the same team yet. Running in training and running in racing are two different things and racing needs to be practiced.
Over the season, Cliff has had two seconds, a third and a fourth in the V50 category and a reasonable showing in the British Half Ironman Champs.

And now a change of subject. In the unfortunate absence of any club team at Kilbarchan last week, Bobby Young and Peter Cartwright ran for a composite Bellahouston Harriers team. Peter was 59th on the third leg in 18:16 and Bobby was 36th in 18:24.