The lead up to the race was far from ideal. The day before the trip, while packing my bike I figured out that thread on left crank arm is damaged. The bike market in Croatia is very small and it’s very hard to find spare parts. At the end I went to Slovenia and bought entire crankset, but the cranks were 2.5mm shorter than the ones I was riding before.
Problems continued the next day when airline lost my luggage. Fortunately they found it the next day and I received it just in time.
The swim was held in a beautiful lake outside of the town. Soon after the start I recognized one other Croatian guy on my side and since he’s a good swimmer I went on his feet and stayed there until the end. It turned out that he had a bad day and we were 5 minutes down on the leaders.
Once on the bike I felt excellent and started passing people. Somewhere around 30-40k I caught Karl-Johan Danielsson from Sweden and Mazzetta from Italy. I shared the work with Danielsson for the remainder of the ride (at legal distance). The course was a bit longer than 120k and had around 850m of ascent, so I’m pleased with my average speed of 41km/h.
There was 3 loop run course mostly trough city park and in each lap we went trough big sports hall where was also the finish line. My legs were good but I felt out of energy. I think I should have consumed more calories on the bike. I was running survival pace from the beginning and got to the finish line with 2.06 run split and 6.04 overall time. This was good enough to be 10th across the line but later I found out 3 guys were disqualified because they didn’t serve their penalties. Two of them were in front of me so I got promoted to 8th spot.
This was probably my best result so far. The best thing is that I had far from ideal race and still finished in good position. I’ll also get some free speed when I finally get a TT bike.
This was my first trip to Basque country and I really liked the nature here. Mountains, green forests, yellow fields, beautiful lakes, old churches and castles… Since I had a lot of stress before the race I forgot to take pictures. I still have some from the day after and I’ll upload it during the day.
| 1. | Eneko Llanos | ESP  |
05:35:34 |
| 2. | Martin Jensen | DEN  |
05:37:00 |
| 3. | Jimmy Johnsen | DEN |
05:49:19 |
| 4. | Mikel Elgezabal Fernandez | ESP |
05:53:58 |
| 5. | Pedro Gomes | POR  |
05:56:50 |
| 6. | Richard Calle Martínez | ESP |
05:57:36 |
| 7. | Jarmo Hast | FIN  |
05:59:22 |
| 8. | Andrej Vistica | CRO  |
06:04:11 |
| 9. | Karl-Johan Danielsson | SWE  |
06:07:59 |
| 10. | Petr Soukup | CZE  |
06:09:06 |
