We had some very impressive results over the weekend. Our LFTC girl’s team took out first place at the Ful-On Duathlon. Sarah Allen was first overall in the women’s race with Hannah Troop coming across the line next for LFTC in sixth place and Ellen Greaves was third across the line in seventh place overall. An awesome effort! On the way to the race Jonny Pollard was busy telling me his bike was his weakest discipline and then he proceeded to rip up the tarmac on the bike to finish first of the LFTC boys. Nice work Jonny but I won’t fall for your ploy next time! Tim Smith and Stuart Hitchcock also had great races. Tim was racing for the first time since the London Marathon and on Saturday night Stuart had made sure his tank was full having downed four or five pints. Well done both for performing admirably!
We also had a group of the boys over in Belgium completing the Liege-Bastogne-Liege sportive. Everyone managed to complete the event. Guy and Matt decided 280km was not quite enough and having biked to the race start, got lost on route and biked back from the finish, they clocked over 300km! It was no wonder Guy was walking like a cowboy when we caught up for a celebratory drink on Sunday. Simon Gerrans from ORICA GreenEDGE won the pro-race and if you want hear some classic Aussie accents (subtitles provided) and see some brilliant celebrations check out the video below.
The ITU World Championship Series was in Africa for the first time ever with this round taking place in Cape Town, SA. Jodie Stimpson showed what a complete athlete she is taking first place in the elite women’s race with fellow Brit Helen Jenkins in second and Gwen Jorgenson of the USA running herself into third.
The elite men’s race also came down to a two horse race with Javier Gomez showing some incredible run form to drop Jonny Brownlee in the last couple of kilometers as he did in Auckland. Dmitry Polyanskiy had the best race of his ITU career finishing in third place. It will be interesting to see what happens when Non Stanford and Alistair Brownlee return to racing.
It is another London League race this weekend with the Thames Turbo Triathlon taking place on Monday. Go team! We also have a big group of LFTC athletes in Lanzarote for this years training camp. I hope you all have a great time and get some quality training in and plenty of laughs along the way as usual. See ya! Tim (LFTC Coach)