chrisfelgate

My journey to the ITU Guatape World Cup started on Tuesday morning. I flew the 10.5 hours to Sao Paulo and then had a further 10 hours to wait. I found a ‘Sleep Easy’ in the airport and booked 6 hours in a room to try catch some rest and get a shower. This made the world of difference and was ready for the further 5.5 hours flight to Bogota, then 1 hour flight to Medellin then the 1.5 hour bus ride to Guatape. I decided to not stay at the host hotel, mainly due to budget constraints, and stay at the ‘Lake View Hostel’ just outside the town. As it were, my entire stay at the hostel cost just over what one night would have cost at the hotel!

The first night at the hostel was disturbing with a neighbour’s cockerel doing its thing from 3am right outside my window. Growing up with chickens etc in Zimbabwe, this is usually not a problem, but not at 3am, on stuck record. What transpired was that it was blind and stuck in a tiny box all day and night so the owners of the hostel actually knapped the bird in the middle of the second night and took it into the bushes to release it! They had been having trouble for about 6 months already!

The town itself was small and quite rural with a mix of all sorts of styles of building. There were small cobbled passages/roads between buildings, as you can see from the pics, of which were used during aspects of the race. The town is built on the edge of Lake Guatape, a manmade lake that provided hydro-electricity for the area. The lake was rich with life, evident from the fish being pulled each day by the locals. Made me very jealous!

The race was on the Sunday so I spent the Thursday, Friday and Saturday going over the course and trying to adapt to the 2000m altitude. The bike course included a number of hills, totally about 2km of climbing in each lap of 8km, which is pretty significant. The night before the race, the sky was thick and full of cumulonimbus clouds which meant one thing, rain. And rain it did, for 14hours consistently. The women’s race was due to start at 8am, this was delayed by an hour, coupled with the course being changed to a sprint race and a 4km lap. This was because a landslide on the course prevented the ITU from using more of the planned bike course. I still don’t know why they didn’t just make it 8 laps and keep it as an Olympic Distance race!

We set off at 10am. The wetsuit 750m swim was fast and furious. I got into some trouble getting dragged under at the first buoy but managed to stay relaxed and get back into rhythm, which I did and eventually came out 20^th of the 66 men in the field. I then remained in the front pack, jostling for place with the constant changes, given we had 4 crashes during the 20km course. The run was always going to be a flat out effort and one of my biggest fears given the race was now a sprint and not Olympic distance. I did manage to maintain a fairly solid pace and finished off 34^th in the race, probably my best finish in an International race since 2008. After the race, I recovered quickly and then set off for an hour run up the original bike course to see this ‘landslide’. It had already been cleared, probably as it is one of the main access points of the town!

Monday morning, after the race, I started my journey back to South Africa at 8am, basically the reverse trip of going there.