Cotswold Classic – Post race email

Good morning all, I hope everyone’s feeling nice and relaxed today after yesterday’s race ?
A sports scientist once told me that when I used to race, the best way to recover from a hard event was to ensure I took in plenty of fluids and get out and do some gentle exercise, and to keep myself busy by sorting all my kit out and checking my bike over. However, I preferred to order a pizza, have a beer and sit in the bath until my fingers looked like raisins, so I’m hoping that many of you are sat at home surrounded by beer cans and your bikes are still in your car with a pile of smelly kit.
Yesterday was a tough day of heat for you all, so I hope that no-one’s too red today, and that everyone has got home safely.

Firstly, and most importantly, thank you all very much for choosing to race with us, and for being the best bunch of competitors we’ve had to date. The residents committee of Castle Eaton Parish Council have already emailed in to say how happy they were with the race and the courtesy of the competitors yesterday, and they respect that June was just a blip on an otherwise faultless record, and it’s you all that have made that possible, so thank you.

I appreciate you’re probably all bored to death with my emails by now, so I’ll keep this one fairly brief
In this mail, I’ll cover the following

How fast you went and how you looked doing it
Race debrief and feedback request
Next year’s races
Lost property
Still a chance to race with our team again this year

How fast you went and how you looked doing it
I get that this is the only bit most people are interested in, so I’ll cover it first
You can find the results and download your certificates here : http://dbmaxresults.co.uk/Results.aspx?CId=16421&RId=2226
The photo’s from the event will be available in the next couple of days here : https://www.charleswhittonphotography.com/cotswold-classic-tri-5818
How the photo’s work is that we pay Charles Whitton photography to be there so that he provides a number of images per competitor that are free for you to download. These are of a resolution high enough to use as a facebook pic etc. If you wanted more pictures with a higher resolution, these can be purchased from his site should you wish to have them blown up and printed.
If any of you have a picture of you looking in worse condition than one I have of me having a pukey meltdown on the run at Ironman Switzerland, I’ll be most impressed 🙂 – Pic HERE

Race debrief and feedback request
After each race, we get back together as a team and debrief on everything that happened on the day, the registration day before and all the things that go on in the run up to the race.
In those debriefs, we literally go through everything and make changes to see what we can improve next time.
We get to see a fair amount of the race from our side, but you all see everything from a totally different perspective, so it’s your feedback on what worked and what didn’t work that I’m really keen to hear.
There’s a few things we’ve already identified, some of which were in our control and some weren’t, and we’ll look at sorting that out for next year’s races straight away.
The main ones we know about were the stretch of new surfaced road you all hit in two directions yesterday that wasn’t great, and we recognise that. We have a reasonable amount of leverage with the local councils and we get at them almost weekly on the state of the roads (I think they’re pretty consistent with most UK roads now). The council called me on Thursday to report that they’d completely resurfaced one of the poor sections and were very proud that they’d found budget to do it. However, as you saw, it was with the stone chip surface, that although will be great to ride on in a couple of weeks when it’s been run in, was less than ideal yesterday, and we apologise for that
The second one was the new water station we put out on the run course due to the heat yesterday at around 0.8miles into the lap. Because of how crazy busy the beach end of Waterpark was, we simply could not get to it to service it as frequently as we’d have liked with water top ups and extra cups, so we have already agreed that if we use that location again on a hot day, we’ll hire in a 2000ltr water bowser rather than trying to continually top up 10 x 60ltr coolers.
We’d love to hear your feedback though, and we’re interested to hear on all aspects of the race from pre race communication, the registration process, the familiarisation day that we held a couple of months back right through to everything yesterday.
All your points will be fed back into our meeting and we’ll see what we can change for next year, and for the things that you all liked, we’ll see what we can do more of.
We appreciate your feedback massively, and it’s hugely important to know exactly what you thought of the whole process
You can also leave us a review at our friends at race check at : https://www.racecheck.com/races/cotswold-classic

Next year’s races
We will have the dates fixed for next year’s two Middle distance races in the next couple of weeks (they’re not going to change much from this year’s dates), and the entries will go live online on Sept 1st
Once the dates are fixed in a couple of weeks, I’ll publish them on our facebook/twitter pages as well as our website.

Lost Property
We have a few bits of lost property from yesterday that have been handed in including a fairly posh front wheel that someone had left in the car park. Myself and Dave will be down the lake today from around 11am to finish off the clear up from the event, so if you’re still in the area, you’re welcome to come along and grab anything you may have left
If not, just drop me a mail and I’ll see what we can do about getting stuff posted out later this week.

Still a chance to race with team 113 again this year
As some of you will already know, the 113 team are also involved in the organisation of the Swindon Half Marathon that runs on Sept 9th this year. Entries to the Swindon Half are still open, and you can find them at www.newswindonhalf.co.uk

Right, that’s it from me for this year’s Triathlons.
It’s a been a pleasure to welcoming you all to our start lines, and we hope to see many of you back racing with us another time, or if you fancied seeing the races from the other side, joining our marshal team for a race or two

Thanks again for coming to race with us, and I wish you all a speedy recovery

Cheers

Graeme, Nicci and the 113 Events team
Tel 07595 591612
Email Graeme@113events.com

Ps, Obligatory post race / pre beer team pic.