Kate's Ironman Tallinn 70.3 Race Report

Getting there

I got the most stressful part of the race out of the way before we left the country, by leaving it until an hour before we needed to leave to attempt to pack my hired bike box, at which point I discovered that the box didn’t come with the correct part to safely pack my disc wheel. Dan made a valiant effort to fashion a home-made solution involving a chopping board and gaffer tape, but I decided better safe than sorry and packed my other set of wheels. I’d been riding them through winter and (having not planned to be racing on them) the tyres had seen better days but they would have to do.

We set off to Stansted on Thursday night in preparation for a 6.20am flight on Friday. I’d booked the closest possible hotel to the airport, the Radisson Blu, to allow a luxurious lie-in until 3.45am. We made it safely onto the plane with bike and luggage aboard and off again in Tallinn a couple of hours later. One of the major plus points about Tallinn as a race venue is the convenience of getting there - the airport is only a few km from the city centre and within 45 minutes of the wheels of the plane touching down we were in the Tallink City Hotel.

Pre-race

Visiting an area for a race, you often don’t get a chance to fully appreciate the sights – because who wants to spend the days before a race on a walking tour of the city, even if there was time in between all the pre-race admin? But Tallinn is a very compact city and we were staying right in the centre, so took a wander through the Old Town, stopping for some lunch before returning to our hotel for an afternoon nap as the 3.45am start caught up on us.

Post-nap, we took an Uber to Rocca al Mar, where registration, along with T2 and the finish line were based. The race organisers had put on free shuttle buses from the city centre to registration and the start, but Ubers were very cheap (about £5-6 for a 15 minute journey) so for convenience we did end up taking quite a few over the weekend. At registration I was pleased to receive a half-decent backpack for once, along with various other freebies including, for some reason, a pouch of Ironman-branded chicken broth.

After a morning run with Dan on Saturday, I began the serious and important process of carb loading at the hotel buffet breakfast. We then had quite a long time to pass until we could get the shuttle bus for bike racking (as the full distance race was on Saturday, so T1 and the roads around it weren’t accessible until late afternoon) so went for another wander and a coffee before returning to the hotel to faff about with stickers and different coloured bags for several hours before taking the shuttle bus to T1, my bike loaded onto the Ironman lorry following behind.

Racking complete, we hired a couple of the electric scooters which were everywhere in Tallinn and zipped down to Rocca al Mar to see a bit of the Ironman finish line (did not make me want to do an Ironman).

Race day morning

The age group race was starting at the very civilized time of 10.30am which meant not having to set the usual crack-of-dawn race morning alarm call for once. The weather forecast was for strong wind and unusually high temperatures for Estonia of up to 32 degrees at the hottest point – not the ideal combination for racing, but nothing to do but put some suncream on, take a deep breath and crack on!

I should mention at this point that on Wednesday, we’d been informed that algae had been found in Lake Harku, where the swim was to take place. For 99 out of 100 race organisers, that would mean a “sorry, we’ve had to cancel the swim, it’s now a duathlon” message. Luckily the Ironman Tallinn organisers are the 1 in 100, and in the space of 3 days moved the swim to the nearest sea, built a pontoon, moved T1, changed the start of the bike course, changed the shuttle bus schedule, and re-printed all the course maps. It all worked perfectly, and to see the start on race morning you would have no idea that none of it was the original plan.

So our bus took us to Stroomi Beach, where after putting my drink and nutrition on my bike we sat down for a looooong wait – transition closed before the pro race started, and there was a big gap between the pros and age groupers to allow all the pros to get onto the second lap of the bike before the age groupers got onto the course. But it was a warm, sunny morning and we were on the beach with our breakfast so it could have been a lot worse. The hotel breakfast bags turned out to contain a cheese and gherkin sandwich plus two doughnuts and a yoghurt. My nervous stomach couldn’t contemplate the cheese and gherkins so I swapped it for Dan’s doughnuts, making my race day breakfast four doughnuts. Carbs and sugar, ideal surely? Perhaps not, but more on that later. I passed the time watching the pro race start and chatting to Sarah, an amazing lady in the 70-74 age group who had taken up triathlon at 50 and gone on race Kona, until at last it was time to line up to get in.

The Swim

Stroomi Beach is very shallow for a long way out so the organisers had built a pontoon to start from at a point where the water was around waist height. Unfortunately the strong winds overnight had made it unsafe, so a beach start and a very long run in it was. I’m usually happy with any swim that involves running rather than swimming (love an Aussie exit), but running on sand for nearly 200m in ankle/shin/knee high water is surprisingly tiring and I was glad to reach the first buoy which was the point we could

actually start swimming. Being in a sheltered bay, the water wasn’t as choppy as it could have been on a windy day, but I was glad of having had some recent sea swimming experience at Eastbourne to remind me how it felt. I managed to find a few pairs of feet to follow and before I knew it we were standing up again to run back to shore and I had a swim PB of 33:48, a couple of minutes faster than I’d been aiming for.

The Bike

Through transition and out onto the bike, and I was quite glad of the bike box mishap meaning no disc wheel, as the cross winds hit straight away and I felt as though I was cycling at a 45 degree angle just to stay upright. A shortlived period of bliss came when we turned to go round a loop and had the wind behind us, but I knew what that meant was coming when we turned again…..basically cycling into a brick wall! I’d never experienced a headwind like it but there was nothing to do but get your head down and get on with it whilst watching your average speed drop pitifully. The crosswind again on the way back felt easy in comparison. As we approached the turnaround point for the second lap, I realized that the change in swim location had added about a mile to the course. I’d hit the power numbers I’d been aiming for and even with the wind, wasn’t too far off where I’d hoped to be on time after the first lap, so was trying to calculate whether the fact that I’d swum a little faster than expected would still allow me to achieve my hoped-for sub-5 time. Little did I know that the extra mile on the bike was going to be the least of my troubles!

Things started going wrong shortly after I’d started the second bike lap. It could have been the heat, the pre-race donuts, swallowing some sea water, the exertion into the wind or a combination of some or all of the above, but I started to feel sick and feeling sick quickly turned into being sick. I optimistically hoped it would just be a short rough patch, so eased off, tried (not entirely successfully) to be sick off the side of the bike rather than onto it, and get some more liquid and fuel in fairly quickly. Unfortunately nothing was really staying down and my power continued to drop but I ploughed on, hoping to turn a metaphorical corner (I was not looking forward to turning an actual corner, which would mean only one thing….MORE WIND!)

At some point during this miserable patch, a motorbike rolled up beside me and an official on the back said something that I didn’t quite catch. At first I thought she’d seen me being sick and was some kind of medical official who was concerned for my wellbeing. I told her I was ok, at which point I realized she was holding up a blue card and telling me I had a drafting penalty and had to stop at the penalty tent for 5 minutes!

It look a minute to even absorb this. I’d never had a drafting penalty before, or even been warned. Once she said it, I could see I was too close to the bike in front but had been too busy feeling sorry for myself to even notice (which is no excuse, of course). I didn’t react very sensibly, at first making a snap decision that I would make up the penalty time by biking REALLY hard for the last 30km or so left, knowing that I’d have a 5 minute rest at the end. After cycling angrily at my FTP for about 3 minutes, I realized that wasn’t a great strategy – not least because it was making me sick again – and spent the remainder of the ride watching my motivation and power drop and my sub-5 hour time slip away. The one upside of the penalty was that the penalty tent was shortly after a feed station, so I grabbed a bottle of water and spent my 5 minutes drinking and cooling myself down in the shade before rolling on into T2.

The Run

I saw Dan for the first time since the start as soon as I left T2 and had a little blub about everything that had gone wrong in the last couple of hours. He told me, in a loving and encouraging way, to crack on, so I did. It was well over 30 degrees by this point with little shade, but I set off at a pace that was optimistic at best and suicidal at worst. A little over 2km in my body let me know what it thought of that as I ground to a halt and puked up everything I still had in me (sorry that there’s such a lot of vomit in this race report, but it featured heavily in the race). After this I actually felt quite a lot better, altered my effort to something more reasonable and focused on getting from one aid station to the next to top up on fluids and ice. I was still well off my usual pace and even though rationally I knew that the effects of the heat and sickness were a big factor, it was hard to avoid thinking miserably about all the time and effort that had gone into getting here for what I felt was going to be a poor result, and deciding that there was absolutely no way I was going to be racing Almere in 3 weeks time!

I saw Dan again around the halfway mark who told me that I’d gone up two places in my age group and had a good chance of catching another couple of women up ahead! This was a surprise to hear and a much needed boost, and helped me to realise that I wasn’t actually having a uniquely terrible race, it was tough all round and everyone was suffering. I got a bit of a second wind after that, especially on the latter part of the lap where the run entered a very welcome shaded area.

Finally, finally, the last kms rolled around and then the relief of the finish line. While I’ve never been so glad to see a finish, I will say that overall this is one aspect of the race that Tallinn loses some points for – there’s no getting away from the fact that the finish line and main race area is in the car park of a suburban shopping centre. I get that the logistics of a city centre finish and road closures needed aren’t always possible, but it wasn’t the most glamorous of race finale’s (although does mean that McDonald’s is very conveniently close by).

Post-Race

I will give Tallinn some extra points, though, for its post-race area which featured proper showers (yes please) and a sauna (no thanks, I feel like I’ve just been running in one) as well as a very good meal. After picking up my gear from T2, we managed to get on a shuttle bus promptly and head back to the hotel for a lie down and to take stock of the race.

My initial feelings were of some disappointment. Racing abroad always adds an extra layer of pressure with the time, effort and money involved in getting there so to have what feels like a poor race always stings a bit more than a local race which can be shaken off quite quickly. In the back of my mind I’d also had an additional hope of qualifying for the 70.3 World Championships which would be in Marbella in 2025, but coming 7th in my age group with usually between 2-4 slots allocated to each of the women’s age groups, this now felt like a long shot. I decided to go to the awards ceremony to see, though – what else was I going to do, lie in my hotel room all evening feeling sorry for myself?

I’ll gloss over the tedium of the awards, suffice to say it felt like they went on for longer than the race itself. Finally came the World Championship slots – women first, thank goodness. The way this works is the MC announces how many slots will be available for each age group in turn, depending on the number of starters in that age group, and the slots are allocated to the top finishers, rolling down if they aren’t taken. Starting with the oldest age groups, nothing seemed to be rolling much beyond 5th place. The age group before me had 3 slots. First and second place took their slots, third didn’t, fourth did. Then my age group, also three slots and my chances seemed slim. The MC called the name of the winner. Silence. Second place. Silence. Third place….silence! I was clutching Dan’s leg at this point. I only needed one more woman not to take their slot and I was going to the world championships! The silence continued – where had all the women in my age group gone?!

In the end, I was the FIRST woman in my age group to accept a slot. Do I feel like I didn’t deserve it? Hell no! I earned that slot the hard way! After going up on stage to collect my qualifiers coin and what was referred to as a ‘diploma’ I was swiftly ushered to a desk at the side of the stage to pay my entrance fee there and then – very slick, Ironman.

This definitely ended my race weekend on a more positive note and on reflection, even aside from qualifying for the world champs I was able to feel happier with how I’d handled what the race had thrown at me on the day. It’s easy (or at least, easier) to push yourself when everything is going to plan, but there’s pride and satisfaction in getting to a finish line when the race is far from what you imagined or hoped for.

On the way to the race, Dan asked me what I liked about racing abroad, and with the stress of the bike box wheel drama fresh in my mind I replied that I really wasn’t sure. But here is my actual answer. We went to a city we probably would never have visited if it weren’t for this race. While we didn’t see as many of the sights as we might have done if it weren’t for the race, I also had some cool experiences I wouldn’t have got on a normal city break – swimming in the Baltic sea, cycling through the beautiful Estonian countryside, zipping around the race area on electric scooters. And as much as I love the convenience and low-stress of a local race, there’s something about seeing thousands of athletes of all nationalities at the start and out on course that does make it a bit more special. Although it turned out to be a much tougher race than I was expecting, overall it was one of the most memorable weekends of my year and a race I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone!