Last week I covered registration, the swim and my challenge not to come last. How did I get on? Well…

Cycle

The cycle route is 54 miles from Sheildag , around the Applecross peninsula and back to Torridon. It involves more climbing than the full Celtman course and includes the famous Bealach na Beag mountain pass. The UK’s highest road and one of the few roads in the UK with Alpine like switchbacks.

But it wasn’t the climbing that I was worried about, it was the descent. I hate cycling down the Bealach to Applecross. A few years ago, a friend fell off the road and broke their shoulder, collarbone and wrist. Admittedly, they’d not checked their brakes before cycling but it has put me off cycling there ever since.

It was raining as we left Shieldag for an eight mile stretch to the bottom of the Bealach. This was a good warm up to get blood pumping into the legs before the harder climbing begun.

I’d cycled it a few days earlier (one of my three outdoor cycles this year, see last week’s entry) so I knew what to expect. A steady climb and then an equally steady descent to the Bealach.

The rain stopped as the climbing begun and while clouds were down, and there was no view once we got to the two thirds point. The road is closed to traffic so it’s good to just put your head down and grind your way up the road knowing there’ll be no traffic coming in the opposite direction.

The first half of the climb is fairly easy, the second half ramps up. I was slow but steady all the way up and my hours on Strava had left some strength in my legs. Who says computer games are bad for you?

On the way down, I kept my brakes on for most of the descent and the squeals from my wheels sounded like someone had just jumped after seeing a mouse all the way down to Applecross.

The next section of the race, around the peninsula, has more climbing than the Bealach, but is spread out over more miles. I’ve cycled the route before so knew what to expect but if you’ve not done it then it can be tough to find you’re going to climb more on what should be a flat section than you do on the climb. But that’s the west coast of Scotland for you. There are no flat sections. Everything is up and down.

On this section, Iain TwinBikeRun punctured twice. He asked if I had a spare tube but as I use a tubeless tyre, I’d already taken it out of my seatbag. His race was over, he had to call his wife to collect him so I thought like the concerned good brother that I am: “haha, well, after that, at least he’ll be last!”

I was wrong.

I finished the cycle without ever pushing myself too hard. As soon as I hit a hill I dropped to the lowest gear and worked my way slowly up it. I didn’t see anyone until the last five miles. Between waiting for Iain and taking my time on the bike, the race was now taking place ahead of me.

At the run, I texted Iain TwinBikeRun to say he should pick up his kit and run with me. He could catch me at transition.

Run

That’s if I could find transition as I almost immediately got lost when leaving Torridon.

I don’t know how I did it but I was running along a road when everyone else was on a track. I saw a runner, he shouted I was running the wrong way and I climbed a bank of heather to join the track he was on only… to get lost again.

I came off the track at a point I thought it joined the road. It didn’t. But I didn’t know that as I climbed from the shore up through the forest at the site of Torridon and to the transition into the lower route around Ben Eighe.

Except I came to the transition after the exit to Ben Eighe, which I knew couldn’t be right. You had to go to transition and then go to the exit. You didn’t go to the exit first.

Again, I was lost. The Marshalls helped by contacting the organisers who confirmed I should keep going. I wasn’t the only one who’d taken a wrong turn.

Iain TwinBikeRun on the other hand had taken the right way and had caught up with me. We were able to leave transition together.

The lower level route had a cut of time of eight and a half hours from staring the race. 1:30 pm after a 5am start. Our aim was to make the cut off. After that, there was no time limit to reach the end.

We ran most of the downhill stretches, some of the flats and walked the uphill. There was some rain but it was largely dry and conditions underfoot were okay.

We saw a few other competitors the course ahead of us, and knew of one behind, who’d been at transition.

What we didn’t know was that these were the last competitors, we were competing for the wooden spoon.

But first we had to make the cut off.

We thought the cut off was 10 miles into the race. This was a mistake. It was actually 12 miles. That meant we had to run all the way down the final descent to get in at 1:26pm. We thought we had more time as the distances were shorter, but we should have checked that more carefully before we started.

Having run the last part, we then walked into the finish, another three miles to Torridon. We might have run but it was straight into a headwind and we wouldn’t have run much faster than we were walking.

The finish line

At the finish we broke into a run and I finished ahead of Iain by a few seconds. I’d made it. I’d achieved my goal. I wasn’t last. Iain was behind me, and even if he wasn’t DNF’d for failing to finish the cycle leg, there was at least one of other person behind me. Result.

Until we got the results and Iain was timed ahead of me! He was fifth last, I was fourth last. The b****ard!

Overall

A cracking challenging race in one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland. Definitely worth checking out if you fancy an extreme triathlon. But I would recommend that, unlike me, you actually get a full training programme behind you before you start.