The following post race newsletter went out to all Cotswold113 competitors today
Hope you’ve got your feet up ?
Hey all
Firstly, thank you for coming racing with us today. The weather didn’t play ball today with a super cold start and then a really hot finish, but on the positive it didn’t either snow or rain.
Hopefully, you all now have your feet firmly up. Sport scientists will have you believe that recovery is created by gentle exercise, protein and carb replenishment. However, I’m a firm believer in the Pizza and beer method 🙂
Anyway, you were all amazing today, and we saw some really stand out performances all across the field and lots of smiles so we truly hope that you all had an amazing day.
I’ve bored you all to death with newsletters over the last few months, so I’ll keep this final one reasonably brief, and cover the following :
Enjoyed it so much, you fancy another go in 5 weeks ?
2024 race date, opening time & easy ways to race
How fast you went and how cool you looked doing it
Race directors debrief and feedback request
Lost property
Enjoyed it so much, you fancy another go in 5 weeks
As many of you will know, we run another Middle distance race in 5 weeks time from the same lake called the Cotswold Classic v2. It has a completely different bike course, but the run and swim are the same, pretty much.
The bike course heads West instead of East is what’s best described as gently rolling rather than pancake flat.
Personally, I’d say it’s actually a faster course as although it does have a small amount of elevation, it has far more flow and much less turns, so you can concentrate more on enjoying the scenery and keeping up a good average pace rather than making lots of turns and out and back sections
Anyway, if you’d entered the June and July race together through our combo entry system, you’d have saved £40
If you’d now like to race again with us on July 9th as a 113 Competitor, just send me back an email and I’ll send you a £40 discount voucher to use for the next 12 days whilst entries are still live.
2024 race date, opening time & easy ways to race
We have now fixed our 2024 dates, and next year’s Cotswold 113 is going to be on June 2nd
We will get entries open in the next few days, and we have a couple of new ways of entering that will hopefully help out everyone through this current cost of living crisis when people have a few less quid in their pockets :
1) Early bird rates – £25 discount for the first 150 entries
2) Staged payments – This is completely new for us, and how it will work is that on a full price entry, you can pay 33% on entry, followed by 33% payable later this year, and the final 34% payable early next year interest free*
* you will have to pay normal price though, and this isn’t available for either early bird rate entries or club entries, but you can choose the staged payment option from the 1st day entries open
I’ll email everyone on our database as soon as we have a date for entries to open – Hopefully later this week or early next week once we can firm up final costs with all our suppliers and stakeholders (it won’t be much different in price to this year)
We will also have our club entries open again as we did this year, and was super popular
We are also looking at ways in which we can make the logistics of an aquabike option work, as I can see from the amount of emails we get that this is becoming increasingly popular – We’ll hopefully have something on this ready by later this year
How fast you went and how cool you looked doing it
I appreciate this is probably the only bit of this email that most of you are interested in.
The provisional results can be found at : https://dbmaxresults.co.uk/results.aspx?CId=16421&RId=421
Please be aware that these are the provisional results, as the timing guys still have a couple of anomalies to edit out, and will be sorted by tomorrow AM.
In terms of prize giving, then you will have noticed that we don’t have one on the day, and I’d like to explain why quickly please :
In order to make our race as inclusive as possible, we don’t want anyone still running on the course whilst prize giving is going ahead as it can give them impression that the race has finished without them. Subsequently, pre covid we did our prize giving later in the afternoon, and that was also not realistic to expect the people that finished at 10am-10:30 to be hanging around for maybe 5 more hours. Subsequently, we now post our prizes out
You will see that we publish result age groups in both the BTF format of 5year age cat’s, and our own of 18-49 and 50+ Male / female, which is the category we send out trophies for, and I will do this week along with the prizes from the race sponsors
Race directors debrief and feedback request
I appreciate that some of you like to know how it went from our side, so I’ll try and summarise.
Competitors today were one of the best groups we’ve had for a long time, so thank you all for being part of that. The amount of unintentional littering around the course was absolutely minimal, and we picked up far less bags than normal from the bike and run courses, as we always try and leave the area cleaner than when we arrive.
From our side, we had a few issues behind the scenes, and hopefully you didn’t see much of any of that (A disproportionate amount of marshals simply didn’t turn up today, and due to issues outside of our control, we had 2 less Police officers on the course than we had planned for)
The only thing you perhaps would have seen initially is that we didn’t perhaps control the flow of swimmers into the water as well as we could have, and this meant that the density of bikes on the course was higher than we would have liked, which leads naturally to drafting. This is an easy fix for us for next time, and something we won’t let happen again, but was something that hopefully went unnoticed by the majority of you
We would like your feedback on how you throught the day went though, as we’re always looking to improve. So, if you get 5 mins, please let me know what you liked and anything you didn’t like about the day, and I’ll take all the feedback into the team debrief that we’ll do later this week once everyone has recovered from sunburn and earache from Dave’s voice.
We run through our races as a full team from start to finish in minute detail post event, and there’s always little bits that have worked very well in the past, that now don’t work as the sport is evolving and people want different things.
These debriefs are super important for us to understand how to keep improving, so please, if you can, let us have some feedback as we only see snippets of the race from our side, whereas your experience on the day means you see far more than we do, and what you guys and girls think is always going to be more important than how we think it went.
Lost property
We have an amount of lost property that was handed in to us at the lake today. Myself, and a few others from 113 will be down there tomorrow from about 9:30am to about 15:00 to get started on cleaning everything up, counting and checking everything and getting it ready to go back into storage for a few weeks until the classic in July
I’ll also be down there for a few hours on Tuesday too
If any of you that have lost anything are staying in the area tonight, you’re welcome to head on down and say hi and have a rummage through our lost property box.
Right, that’s it from me. I’m battered having had just 1.5hours sleep last night, so I doubt I’ll pick up any emails again tonight, but will be back at my desk tomorrow early AM to respond to anyone before heading down to the lake
Thanks again to you all for racing with us, and for being such a great group, and well done again for all of you that smashed it today
Cheers
Graeme, Nicci and the whole 113 Events team
07595 591612
graeme@113events.com