At the start of the year, when I was scanning the landscape for events to put in the diary (pre-negotiation with Mrs L), I noticed the Winter Duathlon Series run by Aberdeenshire Council, and one in particular that was in Aboyne. My in-laws live in Aboyne, so that tied in nicely (staying with her sister and family somehow seems to make me think that my wife will buy my absence more readily. It doesn’t.), and having done the Bowhill series recently (which was fab – do it if you haven’t already) I fancied a crack at some nice trail runs/mountain bike runs in what I imagined would be lovely wooded parts of Aberdeenshire. It’s lucky then, that I looked into this in more detail a few days before departing by train to Stonehaven as it turned out to be a road bike duathlon, on roads, with the runs on roads too. Oh well. Not what I was after, but I’d done a fair amount on the road bike recently so I got going up the road anyway.
Sunday arrived to a sunny Aboyne and I made my way to registration at Aboyne Academy with bike and my transition bits and bobs. There was a choice of two races, the Long and Short (or Little and Large) which consisted of the same 2x 4.2km runs but with either a 15km bike leg, or a double loop of 30km. I scanned at the serious-looking road bikers with their carbon machines and tri bars and thought that perhaps I should have entered the shorter event to mitigate the damage they would inflict on the 30km (flat) road bike section. But it was too late for that. I would just have to make up what time I could on the runs and try to stick in on the bike.
Both races set off together (98 starters), with the idea that the timing chips would sort out the final placings for each race, so to start with I had no idea who I was actually racing against, until it all started to pan out on the bike section. The run legs were the same for both races: we were guided round the outskirts of the village, towards to River Dee and back round towards transition. By the time we came into transition the field had spread out a fair bit, and I was in 6th position, with Peter Henry of Deeside Runners a good bit ahead of the rest of us (he went on to win the shorter event). I then had my usual faff in transition before heading out on the bike onto the A93 Ballater road towards Dinnet. There was a strong head wind and as drafting wasn’t allowed, we had to be careful about how much tucking in behind the bikes in front we could do. At Dinnet we turned left and then left again onto the South Deeside Road and back in the direction we had come. The wind had dropped now and we could really get into the big cogs and hammer the speed up. Unfortunately, this is where the road cyclists came into their own and was passed by a few in their tuck positions with their machines blurring past me. All the more annoying as most of them were average runners, which gave me hope that I could claw back some places on the second run.
As we got into the second loop on the bike, I noticed that many of those who had overtaken my weren’t out of sight, so I tried to stick as close to them as possible. Coming into the transition again, I shoved on the running shoes and got going. There was the usual adjustment over the first half mile for the legs from bike to run (this was the furthest I had cycled in a competitive biking event) but I got into my stride and started to pick off runners ahead of me. It turns out that my second run was the second fastest overall and I managed to claw my way back to 8th overall and 3rd MV (in the longer race) for a very satisfying day out.
This was the third in a series of four duathlons, but worth bearing in mind for next year.
Results here: http://resultsbase.net/Results/IndividualResults.aspx?Id=2341
Mike Lynch