Back to Back Brilliance at Bewl

Bewl is one of my favourite courses to race on; fantastic lake to swim in, fast bike course with a couple of punchy climbs and a hilly trail based run course makes for a tough run to round off a great race! 

 

The swim was wetsuit optional, I opted for the non-wetsuit option. As much as I love my Yonda Ghost Wetsuit, I wanted to make the most of the last two months of non wetsuit open water swimming. The two lap swim started well finding myself in the lead quite early on. By the end of the swim I had amounted a lead of around 2.5 minutes as I headed up the 350m hill climb to T1. I headed out on to the bike with healthy lead, knowing full well the threat of TT bikes coming from behind. I finished the first lap of 20km still in the lead. It wasn’t until I got to ~30km I was caught. I focused on maintaining the gap working on technical sections and the punchy climbs to take full advantage of my road bike set up. I arrived back in to T2 with around 25second deficit to make up on the leader. I exited T2 controlled, not aiming to bring it back in the first kilometre but to work on closing the gap over the first few kilometres. I took the lead on the second of 4 laps with 6km to go. As the run progressed my lead increased a little at a time on each lap. 

 

I was super pleased to be able to take back to back wins having won the 2017 Sprint Distance Title and now the 2018 Standard Distance Title.