The architecture of our apartment block is such that it’s a veritable wind tunnel out there in anything more than a Force 1 on the Beaufort scale. As today is relatively still and bright I decided to wash the bikes. If it were anything other than a wind tunnel out there, I’d have been doing something much more fun.

Washing any more than two bikes at any given time is just awful. Today Shackleton (the commuter fixed-gear Il Pompino) and Peregrine (the race bike) were top of the list. Shackleton because he is out nearly every day and Peregrine because it’s the end of the season and he hasn’t had a wash since before the Galway Tri.

People accuse me of mollycoddling my bikes. So clean are they I have heard the sentiment expressed that I don’t ride them. Well, the reason I mollycoddle them is not just because I love them as much as Marek loves Mr Schitzer but because it enables me to identify maintenance issues earlier rather than later.

Which leads me to this:

Both pictures show an EAI alloy sprocket. The top one should have 16 teeth. It has 13 teeth because three of them have snapped off. The rest of the teeth are a bit — understatement — worn. It has done 17000km, so this is not surprising. For comparison’s sake, the bottom photo shows a 17t sprocket that resides on the flip side of my hub and has been used once, to my recollection.

I confess to a bit of a stomach lurch when I saw that. Doing 160rpm down a hill is not the time for the chain to leap off and jam because there are insufficient teeth to hold it on the sprocket, and 160rpm is by no means unusual for me on my commute, especially on the way home. That could have ended in tears. Not to mention experimental use of the face as an additional ablative braking surface.

However, it didn’t, and because I mollycoddle my bikes I discovered the failure before it caused serious damage. An order has been placed with Will at HubJub and in the meantime I shall fetch Blackbird out from her spot in the corner.

Peregrine, incidentally, is now exceptionally shiny. Despite having been part of my stable for around 6 years, he continues to take my breath away. People who don’t love bicycles don’t know what they are missing.

When I was very young, my mum (whose literary taste is pretty good, even if I am biased) brought home a copy of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed. I read it and it made enough of an impression on me that years later, with everything that has happened in the intervening decades, I still remembered enough of it to have a friend of mine identify it. I tracked it down, bought a new copy, and read it again. On doing so I realised that, not only had I been exposed to a remarkable piece of speculative fiction at a very young age, I had been exposed to my very first piece of queer fiction.

If a book describing a near-immortal, double-X chromosome shapeshifter who ends up fathering children isn’t queer, I’m not entirely sure what is. But that’s an entire semantical discussion for which I have neither time nor inclination.

My own interests are absorbed in human perception, and how our prejudices and preconceptions affect how we view and interact with the world around us. I see it everywhere, from the cyclist lit up like deep sea plankton nevertheless being the victim of a SMIDSY to blatant sexism, racism and homophobia. Take away the blinkers and you start to see into the cracks. The cracks aren’t in the fabric of the world: they exist in the fabric of our cultural norms and assumptions.

Here in the west we are largely caught in a bipolar paradigm. Light and dark, good and evil, black and white, male and female. The real world doesn’t work like that. The darkest night is the one that lets us see the stars most clearly. We are trapped by this adversarial idea of the world that has absolutely no evidence to support it.

If there is no evidence to support it here, in the real world, where the chairs and the hatstands live, then there is no place for such rigid definitions in speculative fiction, where lie the sex lives of crystalline extremophiles and the wistful desires of steampunk robots.

It was for that reason that I was pleased when the Outer Alliance was formed and immediately signed up. Their mission statement reads as follows:

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

I don’t have a lot of work. My longed-for career as a writer is currently closer to the stage of wishful thinking than anything approaching reality. But at the bottom of this post is a rough first draft I penned in response to a prompt on a creative writing course a couple of years or so back. It’s the opening sequence of a story that would like to be much, much longer. The tutor didn’t rate it much. He thought it was a ghost story that had gone off the rails. He was very wrong, but I didn’t ever explain to him that there were no ghosts planned for this tale.

For me, the belief that there are male and female and one copulates with the other and that’s all there is to it flies in the face of everything the natural world tells us. As Mark Morford said:

Let us be perfectly clear. Not every individual animal necessarily displays homosexual traits. But in every sexually active species on the planet, at least some of them do, for all sorts of reasons, and it’s common and obvious and as normal as a warm spring rain falling on a pod of giddy bottlenose dolphins having group sex off the coast of Fiji.

Queer isn’t queer, it’s normal, and thus to fail to have it represented in speculative fiction would be not only refusing to think outside the box, it would be building a much smaller box inside the existing one, climbing inside and shutting the lid.

By the way, Outer Alliance Pride Day is, strictly speaking tomorrow, the 1st September. For various reasons I’m posting this now.

Call it thinking outside the box.

THE NEARNESS OF STRANGERS

I met him/her on the stairs. It wasn’t the first time. We often passed one another, usually while I was on my way down, heading to work with my bike slung over my shoulder wishing for the umpteenth time that I’d managed to find a place that had an elevator.

I’d never worked out whether the person who lived in the flat opposite me was a male or a female. There was an utterly androgynous quality about… well. What pronoun do I use? “It” is too impersonal. I wouldn’t want it used of myself, after all. He or she was about my height, which says nothing. The brown hair was shoulder length, which again is no clue; and the clothes were never quite right. No matter what they were they always looked like their wearer was cross-dressing. I had seen her (or him) wearing everything from silk dresses to a suit and tie and nothing seemed to fit.

On this occasion I waited on the third floor landing while he — he was dressed, very overtly, as a male, so for now it will do — came up the narrow flight below, the bike digging in to the muscle of my shoulder. I was determined to ask. How long had we been neighbours, after all? I should at least find out which was preferred. At first I was impatient because my grip on the bike was slipping and I was running late — again, which would put me in the doghouse — but then I saw there was something desperately sad about him. Usually he just seemed tired. I had naturally assumed that whatever job provided rent money for my mysterious floor-mate was night shift. Maybe that was why I had never done anything more than offer a brief hello in passing. We existed in different halves of the day and our starts and ends were jammed up against one another the wrong way round. Whenever our paths crossed I was always in a rush and he was exhausted.

“Are you okay?” I just blurted it out when he reached the top of the stairs. The question burst from somewhere at the back of my chest and left me feeling a little stupid. I didn’t know this person: this person didn’t know me. Why would anyone share details of their personal life with a stranger? I mean, in all the times I had said hello there had been nothing more than a slight nod in return.

My neighbour stopped, right on the top step, one hand resting on the rail of the balustrade. It was a very elegant hand. My mother would have described it as “artistic”. I could imagine that hand shivering exquisite music from a violin. A totally unexpected chill crept over me as my gaze drifted upwards over the slightly crumpled, stained silk shirt to the eyes.

Dear gods the eyes. I no longer felt the twinge of the bike’s weight on my shoulder, or the growing panic of being late again. I looked into those soft, grey eyes and was lost: trapped, like the wedding guest.

“It is terribly kind of you to ask.”

The eyes held me. In those eyes I could see that the answer was no. No, he was not okay, and would never be okay again. Something terrible had happened, something so dreadful that it could not be voiced out loud. Yet at the same time it had been something that always might happen, and now that it had it was almost a relief.

“Can I…” I wondered why I was whispering. “Can I get you anything?” It seemed a really stupid thing to say even as I said it. There was just this… this need to do something. To help.

His face registered a fleeting expression of uncertain recognition that turned briefly ponderous before vanishing to polite neutrality.

“Thank you, but no. You should be on your way.”

The eyes glanced down at the floor, briefly and deliberately. For a second I felt dizzy. My neighbour stepped past, surrendering the stairs. I was halfway down to the next landing before I was aware I was moving.

When I looked back he — or she — was already on the next flight. All I could see was a pair of elegant boots with cuban heels climbing slowly and oh so wearily onto the fourth floor.

Having said all that, I followed a link from the Buff twitter feed to the Big Bike Bash home page. It’s on this weekend, and it looks like it could be a fun event for all you mountain bike types.

I don’t ride off-road personally. Not that I don’t want to, but I’m limited to firetrails and easy stuff by lack of depth perception. I’ve tried the more technical trails and I fell off. A lot. And hurt myself. A lot.

So, it’s true, I wouldn’t be interested in taking part in the races, but that doesn’t justify the following section, found under the link for “Women’s Events”.

Ever been to an event or race to support your partner, an ended up stood around bored? Well this event is not just for the guys! There are loads of things for the girls to get involved with too! Whether you want to relax in the massage tent or get involved in the action, there’s plenty to keep you busy all weekend!

Say WHAT? I don’t know about you, but when I see “women’s events” I think of “events for women”. You know, maybe a girls-only multilap XC race, or an event put on specifically for those who might find racing against the boys too intimidating but would really love to give it a go. Those women who have probably been convinced by the patronising attitudes of others that cycling is a roughty-toughty sort of affair and isn’t for the likes of them. WOMEN KNOW YOUR PLACE.

What makes this even more bizarre is that there is a decent listing of competitive female categories in the races. Click on the event listing and there are female categories in the two main events. Yet “women’s events” gets a separate listing and would suggest to the unsuspecting reader that what girls do is stand on the sidelines in breathless appreciation of their men before getting bored and wanting to go shopping for cosmetics.

What is with that? Could they not just have had “supporter’s events”? That would have been fairer. Maybe there are non-competing men going who wouldn’t mind winning some organic cosmetics, after all.

You might have noticed by now that I have a bit of a thing for bicycles.

Oh. Hey. Guess what. I’m a girl.

This isn’t news, right? Well, apparently it still is to the bicycle industry. Sustrans sent out mystery shoppers, all women, ranging in age and cycling experience.

While the majority of the 633 women who took part in the survey reported a positive experience in the shops they visited, the range of products on offer, and the way they are presented is sending women straight out of the door, and for some, straight online.

Sustrans’ mystery shoppers ranged from eight to 88 with all levels of experience from complete beginners to women who cycle every day. The new cyclists are generally happy with the service they are getting, it’s the experienced cyclists that are feeling short-changed…

Melissa Henry, Sustrans’ Communications Director explains more: “We found that experienced cyclists, those women who know what they do and don’t want, are left feeling patronised – the assumption appearing to be that women know nothing about bikes. Experienced cyclists of all ages were left feeling that a bike shop was akin to an alien landscape, with them as the alien.”

My feelings regarding Sustrans aside, this particular finding surprises me about as much as the sun coming up in the morning, water being wet, grass being green and drivers running red lights. Bike manufacturers are getting better and better at providing for the female rider, with compact frames, shorter top tubes and anatomy-specific contact points and clothing. They still seem to be stuck on the idea that girl = pink or powder blue, but it’s a start.

The problem is not so much the availability of kit any more, but the attitude of bike shop staff towards the women buying it. Down in Exeter I was spoiled for choice, with both The Bike Shed and Richard’s Bikes treating me exactly as I wanted to be treated: as a cyclist who happened to be a girl. This contrasted greatly with Mud Dock (closed down several years ago and good riddance), where the staff seemed to think that, as a girl, I should be worrying more about chipping my nail polish than I was about halide lighting systems for winter commuting; and that it was okay to insist that their idea of what would work for me was better than mine. If I go into a shop and tell them exactly what I want I expect to be treated like I know what I’m doing because, hey guys? I do.

Fairly recently I was in a shop in Edinburgh that shall remain nameless and having what started as a friendly chat with the guy on the till. It stopped being friendly round about the time he said: “Well I’m sure there are girls who are strong enough to ride fixed.” I suppose he must have realised that he’d just lit the blue touch paper because he tried damping the flames with some statements that were meant to be conciliatory but were in reality just as patronising; only to be rescued by Munky dragging me away before I grabbed a powder pink Giro helmet from the shelf and beat him to death with it.

He wasn’t trying to be patronising. He didn’t mean it. He opened his mouth and put his foot in it. But this wasn’t the standard, overplayed trope of a male giving a straightforward answer that isn’t what the woman wants to hear (“What do you mean my bum looks big in this?”): it was halfway through a conversation about how we were riding coast to coast on fixed gear bikes overnight, and we’d already done it twice. Even faced with incontrovertible evidence of girls riding fixed (mine was locked up outside the shop), there was this ingrained attitude that it was a freak occurrence.

Because we all know girls should ride Pashley Princesses or, if they’re particularly sporty, maybe a Specialized Dolce.

Even when I was buying spokes to rebuild a front wheel, walking into a (different) shop and giving the spoke length and number I wanted, the look on the guy’s face was just that bit incredulous. He didn’t pass comment until I was walking out: “Good luck with that.” Would he have said that if I were male?

Now it’s very easy to misinterpret what might be honestly-meant comments, but, as an experienced and technically competent female cyclist, what I notice isn’t so much the occasional blatant comment (the title of this piece being my favourite to date) as the cumulative effect of little things. The continual questioning of decisions I have already made and the faintly blank stares, as if they can’t quite believe that those words have come out of my mouth: a mouth that resides, it has to be said, above a fairly obvious pair of breasts.

Yes, thank you, I do want that particular chain. No, I don’t want one of those ones because they are made of mushrooms and cheese. Why yes, I do have experience of that particular brand. Hence the mushrooms and cheese. No, I don’t want a steel cog. I have been getting on just fine with the alloy one, which is, you have to agree, more attractive. Please don’t try to sell me that headset. I know it’s cheaper. My bike deserves better and so do I. If I say I want double-butted I bloody well want double-butted, and I do understand that it’s not a reference to arse-cheeks on the Chippendales.

And, for the final time, NO I DO NOT WANT THAT ONE JUST BECAUSE IT COMES IN PINK, KTHXBAI. MY CUSTOM IS GOING ELSEWHERE.

It’s time for the retail industry to start catching up with the growing number of girls who are into it as much as the guys are. But, ladies, that’s not going to happen if we flounce out of the shop in a huff the first time we have to deal with this sort of prejudice. It’s no good retreating to the internet. Attitudes are only going to change if there is a drive for them to do so. Your local bike shop is an incredibly valuable resource, even if it does seem to think that competent females are on a par with talking donkeys. So give them a chance to improve before reverting to the relative safety of Wiggle.

Bike shops employing female staff are not as safe as you might think, unless those staff are mechanics. However, for the record, I’ve found that shops catering to triathletes don’t suffer from this bias nearly so much. So if you’re really struggling with a male-dominated bike shop whose staff thinks girls belong on three-speed shoppers with flowers in their hair (or, at least, on their suitably pink helmets), try finding your local triathlon shop.

In honour of the latest tri photos and the approaching end of the season — I know it’s only August but the only race left on my calendar is Haddington (I refuse to do Aquathons or Duathlons) — I have created a new avatar for triathlon. The old static one taken from a photo in my first race season is/was rather passé.

Three years of triathlon rendered into one handy avatar. This is the long version that LJ won’t let me have because LJ has a 40k limit.

My dear friend Maura has uploaded some fine photos taken at the Tri Chonamara.

Note that I’m wearing the Speedo Aquasocket goggles in this shot. I have already reviewed those and have no reason to change my opinion. Not only are they a great fit and a great lens colour, they survived being kicked several times in the melee without being knocked off or leaking even a little bit.

For the rest of the set, click here.

I’m working from home today as I have a bout of gastroenteritis. Or food poisoning. Or gut flu. Whatever it is seems to be content to prowl around making me feel just a tad less than my usual splendid self, its presence plain but not debilitating, as long as I don’t eat anything. If I eat anything resembling proper food it’s a different matter altogether. So I don’t feel unwell enough not to work, but I don’t feel well enough to go into the office, especially as I’d have to cycle because the car is in for servicing.

In response to a livejournal post on BikePirates I put up some pics of my bikes, and, I have to say, that has cheered me up no end. Share my joy with a touch of bike pr0n for a Friday morning.

The fast one (Peregrine the Pinarello):

The loaded one (Fingal, Orbit Fast Tour):

The fixed one (Shackleton, last of the 135mm Il Pompinos):

The other fixed one (Blackbird, a rescued and rebuilt Raleigh Sun Solo circa 1983):

The sometimes grubby one (Max, a Specialized Hard Rock from before they got ugly, with his friend, Bob):

And if that didn’t make you feel better about the world in general then it’s either because you’re envious of my stable (perfectly understandable) or you prefer lolcats of a Friday.

If that didn’t work then there ish no pleeshing you.

Little Big Planet may look like a game for kiddies, but I can assure you that grown-ups play it too, and are just as fond of mucking about with their sackpeople. No, that is not a euphemism.

Frood (AKA Alibarbarella) and I have played the story levels all the way through and a great many of the community levels, and here’s my short guide for level-makers to creating enjoyable levels that will result in these two picky customers giving you five stars and a heart.

#1 – Single player vs. co-op

You might think that this shouldn’t need to be said, but it does. If your level doesn’t work very well when more than one sackperson is on the field, say so in the description. It doesn’t mean we won’t play it — we’ll switch off one of the controllers and one of us will watch the other one play. The levels that play themselves are good examples. If two of you embark on one of those, a helpful NPC reminds you to switch off one of the controllers.

If your level is designed to work for co-op that’s fantastic. We love co-op games. Levels we can play together are the levels that keep us coming back for more. LBP is, after all, also a social game. That said, if you need more than one player to complete your level, you should say so. If your level can be played by two or more but you’re better off approaching the obstacles one at a time, it’s helpful if you explain that, too.

Remember that co-op sackpeople don’t like being separated. If your obstacles cover a lot of space, make sure that all players can complete each one together, otherwise there will be much peeping and someone will end up piffing.

#2 Storytelling
The best levels have an economy such as would be found in a short story (I’ll talk more about telling stories with levels in a later post). There’s no point putting in a hellishly fiendish obstacle if the sackpeople can just go around it, and sticking a few points balls at the top isn’t incentive enough to waste valuable lives making the attempt unless you’re trying to ace the level.

Frankly, life’s too short.

A really neat sticker (especially one that becomes a switch trigger later) might induce me to tackle an obstacle that’s not vital to completing the level, but I don’t get a kick out of grabbing everything there is to grab. Not everyone does. If I reach the end and it says I’ve only managed to find 64% of the items, that doesn’t necessarily make me unhappy or want to play it again. A good story, with well thought-out obstacles — that makes me want to play it again.

Check out Innocent Cows… That’s a great level, and we’ve played it a few times. Note that it took two months of work and hand-drawn artwork. Good levels don’t come easily.

#3 Gremlins
If you haven’t heard of beta testing, then you’re doing it wrong.

Sackpeople are like hamsters, or octopuses. When you want them to go through a gap they’ll stubbornly refuse and hop to either side of it like it’s the fourth wall. When you don’t want them to go through a gap, they’ll be straight through there and nothing you can do will stop them. Then they’ll get stuck.

They also break things. The players out there will take your level and turn it into so much useless junk, if you haven’t built it robustly. There’s very little worse in Little Big Planet land than getting halfway through a level and discovering you’ve broken it. A pretty typical flaw is when a level generates a vehicle as a one-off, it somehow gets broken or lost (sackpeople also let go when you least expect it) and then you can’t finish the level because the vehicle was necessary to get to the next area.

In addition, we don’t like it when we find ourselves behind the scenes, looking at the winches and pulleys, and can’t get out again.

In short, don’t give us a level we can break. That makes for sad, angry sackpeople.

#4 Number of lives
There’s something to be said for the infinite lives portals. A couple of community levels out there (I can’t look them up because Frood is hogging the machine for level building right now) are designed to be one trap after another. Relax, it tells you. You will die. It’s fine. You have infinite lives. Sit back and enjoy.

And we did.

Running out of lives halfway through a level and having to start again might be part of the fun for some — I own more than one version of R-Type, I get it, I really do — but personally I prefer not having to go all the way back and start again. If you’ve got a particularly tricky bit in your level, in which it’s necessary to get it right to within a hair’s breadth, or learn a complex pattern, consider using a double portal, at the very least. I don’t mind dying, but I don’t like getting frustrated. Gaming is supposed to be fun.

On the other hand, there are tags for “tricky” and “frustrating”, so if you like killing sackpeople go right ahead. It’s just that we’ll probably skip it.

#5 Descriptions
Use these wisely, young sackperson! You can get away with almost anything if you explain it up front. There will be players out there who will enjoy whatever fiendish tricks you have to offer, so make your description count! For every player who wants to bring three friends there’s another who likes having levels all to himself. For every player who likes infinite lives there are more who like the challenge of having to do a level over and over to get it right. The important thing is to give us levels that work and are fun to play. If a description covers the important facts then we can choose the ones we are more likely to find enjoyable and you are more likely to get hearted.

I was riding back from Real Foods yesterday, bags stuffed with veggies, tofu, rice, two types of tea, chocolate covered espresso beans and a selection of bath ballistics (I’d been to Whittard’s and Lush as well — if only I could get all of those things at the health food store). I was on Shackleton, my fixed gear Il Pompino and, as I pulled out to accelerate past a slow-moving bus, I had an experience that reminded me why I ride bikes and why, more to the point, I ride fixed.

It’s going to be hard to describe.

There’s a moment when, if you get it right, putting the power through the pedals becomes a sublime act that joins the very top of your head all the way down through your feet and the bike to the road itself, and you can feel the connection in the backs of your thighs. You don’t get this from pedal mashing — the HULK SMASH! stomping technique of acceleration — which is why it is easier to find on a fixed gear. The fixed gear forces you to spin, to work in circles. It forces you to be smooth, serene, sublime. It’s listening to Zero 7 in the bath with a glass of chilled Chablis. It’s lying on the beach with a warm can of coke and sand in your hair.

Synaesthetically, riding a fixed gear is the water feature in a Zen garden.

There’s something joyous about riding a bike, and not just a fixed gear. People sometimes ask me how I do it. Why I do it. Mention the Dumb Run and the first thing people ask is if you’re doing it for charity.

“No, we’re doing it for fun.”

Fun. We ride bikes for the moments when your face splits helplessly into a massive grin for the sheer exhilaration of being alive and doing something that’s both insanely silly and undeniably enjoyable. Balanced on a contraption made of a few tubes of metal and a couple of round things; something that’s only inherently stable if it’s moving. Bicycles come alive when they move. When they’re stationary they’re cogs and gears and levers. When they move, though, when you’re on one…

Driving to work is a chore. Riding to work is being on your bike. Taking the bus into town is a pain in the arse. Riding into town is a jaunt.

Yesterday reminded me that the only proper response to people asking why I do it is: “Why don’t you?”

You’d think that, after about three years of competing in triathlon, the idea of doing a standard distance wouldn’t be so horrifying. And yet…

For those of you out there who have better things to do with your spare time, there are basically four distances on the triathlon calendar. The short courses are Sprint, at 750m swim, 20km bike and 5km run (my usual distance); and Standard, at 1500m, 40km and 10km. The long courses are Middle, or half-Ironman, at 1900m, 90km, 21.09km (yahrly); and Full, or Ironman, at 3800m, 180km, 42.2km. There are a bunch of others, but of them you only really get the super-sprint or “try-a-tri” distance on the UK circuit, as far as I know.

The Standard distance, compared to a Full, for instance, isn’t very long. But it’s double a Sprint, and I’ve only done Sprints for the last three years. I had intended doing Gullane last year, however I had surgery for a broken tooth a couple of months earlier, which ruined my training; and I had just put a stress fracture in my foot.

What possessed me to enter the Galway Triathlon Club‘s Triathlon Chonamara as my first standard as opposed to something sensible like, say, Gullane, or Strathclyde, I have no idea.

That’s not strictly true, but it’s nothing to do with sports.

I have nothing but good to say about the Irish triathlon scene, don’t get me wrong. It’s just… Travelling with triathlon gear is expensive. Triathlon is, generally, not the cheapest sport in which to participate, especially when you get going on the open water races. Three disciplines add up to a fair amount of kit, and transporting all that kit on a plane turns into an excuse for the airlines to start recouping all that money they lose out on cheap air deals.

I calculated the cost of racing in the Galway tri — flights and entry fee — at around £200. Frood said that’s what credit cards are for. I checked that it would be okay with my dear friend Maura (there’s what possessed me to enter Galway) for me to come and stay with her, and then called the airline.

As it turned out, competing in triathlon abroad is a bit like building your own home. You calculate the cost but you should add at least 50% because it always ends up costing more.

I’m only going on about the cost because it’s important to realise that neither a Did Not Start (DNS) nor a Did Not Finish (DNF) was going to be an option. Counting it all up I reckon the trip cost me about £350, and no way was I going to spend that and not complete the race. In addition, that amount of financial investment is a serious motivator to put in the work. When you’re spending so much you want to make a good account of yourself.

I put in the work.

Over the last two or three months before the race I was training twice or three times most weekdays in at least two disciplines. I went from running two or three times a week to running four or five. My swim training went from an average of 1000 – 2000m each session to a minimum of 2000m and usually 3000m. I took a minute off my 750m time. In fact, I smashed this year’s swim goals and was revising them at each monthly review.

I should have felt confident.

Should.

I borrowed a padded bike bag from Munky and the day before departure Frood and I dismantled my Pinarello and covered him in enough bubble wrap to float a Sherman tank. Frood is one of the people who have better things to do with their spare time and was off to Truck the same day I left for Ireland. I had to take a taxi to the airport.

Full marks to Aer Arann — those tickets weren’t cheap, but they took good care of my bike and I was permitted the full 15kg free baggage allowance in addition to the trusty steed.

I had a day in between arrival and the race itself to get the bike rebuilt and out for a shake-down. I found it amazing that, despite putting tape everywhere I thought possible to indicate where things like the aerobars should be positioned and the level of the handlebars, I still had to make some major tweaks. I seriously recommend, if you’re travelling somewhere that requires dismantling your bike, you leave yourself plenty of time at the other end for sorting it out again.

The race day itself dawned bright and sunny and almost windless. That wasn’t expected. The weather forecast had been for southerly winds, causing me a certain amount of dismay, as that was the only direction that could cause chop. I could cope with just about any weather conditions (so I thought) except for serious chop. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of wind at all. This could be good.

Maura kindly drove me to Chil Chiarain — no further in miles than it is to most of my races back home, but taking a lot longer because the roads are narrow and twisty. It had rained and there were still clouds in the sky. It looked set for squalls, but that was okay. I like racing in the rain. As long as there was no chop.

I had to borrow a track pump from another girl to get my tyres up to full pressure. My Specialized hand pump is light enough to carry on the plane, and very good, but not for race pressure. The only alternative was to waste a newly-purchased CO₂ cartridge on pumping up my tyres, and I didn’t want to do that. Although, in hindsight, I might as well have done as I couldn’t bring them home with me anyway.

At registration Maura kept an eye on my bike while I went in for body marking. This was her first triathlon and the first thing she noticed was the way all the passing competitors gave the Pinarello a good ogling. It’s the done thing, isn’t it? There are three main perks to competing: bike pr0n, tri totty and the freebies. There was a decent amount of bike pr0n on offer, the totty was more than adequate and the freebies were great. It’s the only tri I’ve been to where the t-shirt was (a) technical, and therefore useful; and (b) available in a girlie fitting and small size! Respect, Galway. Seriously.

Transition was quite a way from registration, down on the pier. The Irish experience was largely one of late arrivals: in Scotland you turn up earlier rather than later, and you get your kit sorted out in good time before milling around wishing you’d brought another banana. In Ireland they have to put a big warning in capital letters in the briefing pack: TRANSITION CLOSES AT 10:30, SORRY NO EXCEPTIONS!

Only there were, weren’t there?

By race briefing the pre-race nerves had turned to nausea and the shakes. This wasn’t helped by the race director saying it had become choppy out there, nor the fact that, even though I regularly do 3000m in training in the pool, 1500m in open water looks a bloody long way: It’s HOW FAR between those buoys? I can barely see the last one!

Thankfully I didn’t have to spend long feeling sick. Soon enough it was into the water in one vast mass of orange and white caps and before I knew it I was bobbing around trying to find a good position for the off. The countdown came from the pier, the spectators joining in, and then it was into the blender.

I’d just read an article about assertive positioning in Triathlon 220, and I think I coped quite well with swimming in the pack. I was kicked in the face three times and it didn’t put me off. Much. In the bright sunshine navigation was fairly easy: just follow the others as long as they look like they’re going in the right direction. I don’t know how I’d have managed if I’d been at the front. I hadn’t been able to get a good look at the relative positions of the buoys, and they were impossible to see until I was quite close, despite being massive, bright pink space hopper things.

Although officially the back leg was the farthest, it was the swim back into shore from the last buoy that took the longest. We must have been against the current. I had to resist the urge to stop and swim down to poke a particularly fine specimen of cauliflower jellyfish, as tempting as it was. Then it was into the shallows where the seaweed was tangling around arms and ankles, before finally my feet could reach bottom and it was a wade to the mat while struggling to get that all-important first arm out.

T1 was a dizzy affair. I couldn’t get my suit off my feet and every time I bent down to try to free myself I nearly fell over. I was no longer swimming but my brain hadn’t stopped yet and very much didn’t like being upside down. Eventually I managed to get free of the neoprene, my helmet already on, pulled on cycling shoes — another fight with the fainting feeling — then it was a run through transition to the bottom of the hill up to the road. I felt nauseous, which could have been the seawater but I think was more likely to be the change from swimming to being upright.

Almost immediately I passed one of the pointy hat brigade, which cheered me up no end. That first bike leg was fast and smooth, and at one point I was churning along at 55km/h wondering when my heart rate was going to drop out of the high 170s but feeling good on it.

Turning left onto the “bog road” the surface deteriorated and the land turned corrugated. I risked falling foul of the blasphemy laws as I hit pothole after pothole. At one point I saw a saddle lying forlornly in the middle of the road. Mechanicals were going to prove a problem for a few people on the bike leg.

I was passed by a number of people on the bike, which at the time was pretty demoralising. The sun was hot — how hot I wouldn’t realise until much later — and on the back straight the headwind turned meaty. The biggest annoyance on the bike section had to be the group of guys chain-ganging it, zipping past like it was a stage on Le Tour and they were escorting their sprinter to the Lanterne Rouge. NEED MOAR DRAFT BUSTERS.

Into T2, which was appallingly slow, although I couldn’t tell you for why, and then straight into 3km of tortuous ascent in the blazing sun on the run. I saw the clock reading 02:00.01 and realised I was on track for my goal of 3 hours, managed to keep up the pace until out of sight of the spectators, purely for pride’s sake; then, I confess, I walked. The fast guys were already on their way back to the finish. Despair hit me for the first time. Seeing the 1km sign I was surprised — I couldn’t have reached 1km already, surely? But I had 9 more to go and I wasn’t sure I could. My legs felt like old, brittle rubber bands.

For the first time ever in any race I wondered if I’d DNF.

But thoughts like that aren’t helpful, so I started making deals with myself. Run to that fence post/clump of grass/pothole/pile of rabbit droppings and then we can walk for a bit. We’ll walk this steep bit but then we run for a bit, right? It was incredibly painful, but not in any way that’s easy to describe. I wasn’t particularly out of breath — heart rate in the 170s is higher than I’d like these days, but it’s not a problem. I ran all of Tranent at about 174. I was, fundamentally, overheating. I could feel parts of me shutting down in protest. When I tried to run with no intention of slowing down for a walk, I’d find myself suddenly at a walking pace without having made any conscious decision to walk, simply so I could cool down.

A conscious run-walk-run strategy at least allowed me to determine how much I walked and how much I ran, so on the out leg I walked the steep uphill bits and ran the rest. Up and over the hill, down to the turnaround at about 5.5km. On the way back I took advantage of the water station, because I needed to pour some of the damn stuff over my head. I’d donned a Camelbak Alterra in T2 and was already most of the way through the litre of water in there but there wasn’t far to go.

At 7.5km it was (mostly) downhill to the finish and I told myself: come on. Two and a half is nothing. You do three times that distance most lunchtimes. Let’s at least run the rest of the race.

So I did. I ran the last 2.5km and even managed a sprint finish to cross the line at exactly the same time as the girl trying to overtake me in the last few metres.

Times:

Swim: 00:26’42
T1: 00:02’19
Bike: 01:28’29
T2: 00:02’12
Run: 01:06’56
Overall: 03:06’36

Full results can be found here. I was second joint equal in the F35-39 age group. Overall 146th out of 176, which is less impressive.

Again, it was the run that let me down. That and my complete inability to deal with the heat. Given that I felt absolutely fine within 15 minutes of finishing, when I’d cooled down and got some more water inside me, and I was pretty badly sunburnt, I’d say that my performance suffered from the sunny conditions, although it made everything very pleasant for everyone else. The next day I felt ready for more. Either my recovery is extraordinary or something environmental kept me from pushing as hard as I could. At the end I was literally encrusted with salt from the sweat.

The swim leg was storming, for me: hence being passed on the bike wasn’t so bad. I was 61st out of the water and 133rd on the bike. I knew up front that I hadn’t put enough speed work in on the bike so I can’t really complain about that; and I was holding back for the run, which I was only too aware was going to clobber me with righteous pounding.

Do it again? Afterwards I was 100% convinced I’d never do another standard. Ever. Ever ever ever. That was three hours of horrible as opposed to a sprint distance hour and a half of horrible. Now though? Now I can see where I went wrong in training, how I could improve, how I could get faster, and, dammit, I want to do a race at that distance I can feel generally good about rather than feeling, overall, generally dissatisfied with my performance.

I remember what happened after my first sprint, you see. I hated that, too. And now I do about 6 a year.

Maybe I’ll give it another go next year. After all, I can’t compare any other standard to that one, because they’re all so different. If I do, though, I’ll be doing a helluva lot more hill training. And bricks. Many, many bricks.

Congratulations and thanks to the Galway Triathlon Club for a well-organised, friendly race and incredibly helpful marshals. In terms of set-up, organisation, and all-round make-a-girl-want-to-do-it-again they’re right up there. And, of course, the location is exquisitely beautiful.

Next up: Haddington. Should be interesting to see how a sprint distance feels now.