Now is a great time to find a couple of race dates and pencil them in to give you some focus for your training (you don’t need to enter them yet but have them in your diary as possible events). Your event doesn’t need to be a big bucket list triathlon like London or Blenheim. For your first few triathlons it’s really nice to stay small and local. You’ll be able to pre-recce the courses and due to limits on participant numbers, it will feel far less intense than a big event. It will also be cheaper and usually easier to get to.
We would recommend a pool-based swim for your first triathlon and then, providing you’ve done some open water training with us, you can graduate on to doing an open water triathlon. However, there is no need to rush this, take it at your own pace. Some people only do pool based triathlons and that is absolutely fine. We would advise not entering an open water triathlon until you’ve tried open water swimming, even some strong pool swimmers can struggle in open water.
Consider super-sprint and sprint distance races to start with and learn what to do before taking on longer distances. The Brownlee brothers and other great triathletes spent years honing their skills on Sprints and Standard distance races before moving to 70.3 and long distance (Ironman). Don’t feel you need to do what someone else does either – there are many different directions you can take in multisport.
Some good pool triathlons which we like to attend (provisional dates):
Bury St. Edmunds Festival of Triathlon – 10th April (Bury St. Edmunds)
HSV triathlon 8th May – Hatfield
Hitchin Triathlon 3rd July – Hitchin
Grays Triathlon July – Grays near Thurrock
Walden triathlon 4th Sept – Saffron Walden (club usually attends)
Havertri in early October is a fun pool-based triathlon which we often support as an end-of-season race.
St Neots various dates from May – St Neots (club usually attends)
Eton Dorney various dates and organisers from May – Dorney near Windsor (this is a closed-road event, so no traffic on the bike route)
