May 22nd: Dromineer Aquathon Series: Race 1. Start: 7:00pm | May 26th: Tour of Lough Derg.

Best of luck: to Eoin Woolley, Eoin Sheehan and Paul Walsh who are all taking part in the National Middle Distance triathlon championships at Tri an Mhí this weekend.

Kilkee Triathlon: Individual Entry: A few club members have had to pull out of the ‘Hell of the West’ Kilkee Triathlon. If you want to take one of their places then send a text to Shane 0872605743. Also, if you haven’t yet paid for your Kilkee entry then try and settle up before the end of the week.

Sunday Lake Swim: a reminder that this will take place in Dromineer this Sunday at 6:00pm. We will be preparing for next week’s first aquathon, by swimming the race route.

Bike Racing Team: We had a good spin on Thursday evening. There were 9 of us out and we managed to hit a solid 25mph for the 25 mile route. This is our fastest average speed on the route so well done to everyone for putting in a great effort. Next Thursday we will be starting from Toom and this will bring the total race distance to 30 mile. Try not to miss it as these sessions really bring you on. Weekend racing: There is a race in Clare on Saturday and Dungarvan on Sunday. Try and make it to at least one of them.

The Thursday night brick session was well attended and teamed up with the racing group for a joint warm up out to Moneygall. From there the race group started their roll over session to Roscrea and back while the Brick group headed straight back to Nenagh for the combined bike/run session.
 
A brick session emulates the race – where you only take a handful of minutes after getting off the bike before heading out to run, its an  invaluable training tool -  wobbly legs are something totally new when you do your first brick.
As triathletes will tell you, getting the legs running properly and efficiently off the bike can be a real challenge. This is particularly due to the lack of activation of the glute muscles coming off the bike, as you begin to run.
 
The term “brick” has multiple claims of origination. Among those is the derivation from a partial anagram of Bike-Run, it may  also be a descriptive term for how your legs feel for the first part of the run (like bricks). Another is credited to Mark Sisson and Scott Zagarino (1988), who associated the term brick with the idea of “Just another brick in the wall”… as per the song by the group “Pink Floyd”!
 
All agreed that our brick session worked well, with a good warm up, a hard roll over session and a short but sharp(ish) run session. More members for next Thursday please!

The route for this Saturdays cycle is:

Nenagh – Gortnaskehy (Limerick Rd)- Shallee Hill – Newport – Rear Cross – Kilcommon – Dolla – Nenagh

Saturdays cycle/training session will consist of roll overs, sprints and hill repeats (Shallee Hill, at least twice). Don’t forget to bring food and drink and make sure your brakes are working!!

Tomorrow evening (Thursday) the club will be doing a brick session. We will meet at 6.30 in the CBS. This session will consist of a cycle from Nenagh to Moneygal where we will turn around and do a roll over session back to the CBS. There will then be a run around the track/hills here. Don’t forget to bring your runners.

Dromineer Race Series: The first race in Dromineer on Wednesday May 22nd will be an aquathon. With the water temps and air temps being a bit on the low side it makes sense to leave the first tri for a little while as you can experience a bad chill on the bike after a cold swim. A short and quick aquathon will get you warmed up quickly and it will provide a good test too.

Format: An aquathon consists of a swim followed by a run. The first of these aquathons is usually taken at a handy enough pace (so there is no excuse for not turning up – just use it as a training session), but you can go as fast or as slow as you want.

Start time: 7:00pm. This race will be handicapped but as it is very short there will not be much of a time difference between everyone. The first person will need to be getting in the water at 6:55 and will start at 7:00. Do not get into the water until fairly close to your start time as you will get cold. A quick, fast warm-up is all that’s needed.

Pier to pier option for beginners: For those that are new to open water swimming and are not confident in the water then we urge you to just swim pier to pier 7 times. You can stand up at all times doing this and you will still get the same distance in.

Preparation: To prepare for this event you really need to have gotten into the open water beforehand. Next Sunday we are going to change the open water swim location to Dromineer so that everyone can practice the route and build confidence for the day of the race.

What you need: courage (we realise that many in our club are scared of their own shadows, the only advice we can give you is to tell you to ‘toughen the f*** up!!’), a triathlon wetsuit, two swim caps or a skull cap, goggles, you can cover your feet too with swim socks if you want, lubrication to get you out of the wetsuit quickly, trisuit worn under the wetsuit, runners that are left in transition (buy lock laces for your runners), fake tan (Kevin Sherlock told me to add that one – he said it saved him two minutes at the Joey Hannon triathlon).

What you will get: feel good endorphins, the strength of a bear, warm-up cup of tea / coffee + biscuits.

Race Distance: 650m swim, 5km run.

Valentia Triathlon: The 3rd race of the National Series took place last Saturday down in Valentia. The club had two representatives at the race Ronan O’Driscoll and Ramon Rodriguez. This was the first open water race of the year but unfortunately the water temps were still too cold to let the swim proceed. The triathlon was therefore changed to a duathlon. Ronan was first home for the club finishing in 90th and Ramon finished in 377th. Well done to both lads for bringing more points home for the club in the National Series.

National Series: Already there have been 3 National Series events. Remember these events sell out well in advance. You need to get 5 races in if you want to have a chance of scoring for the team. Check out Triathlon Ireland to see a list of National Series race.

County Track: Killian Cullagh was competing at the recent county track and field championships. As usual he won plenty of medals. He won gold in the 1500m and silver in the 800m.

Open Water Swimming: Well done to the brave 12 or so people that got into Youghal on Sunday evening. There is no point in lying – it was freezing!! It better warm-up a bit more over the next week or two. Sun… where are you? (Majorca, seemingly!)

Jealous: While we continue to endure the wind, rain and cold, three of our club members are off sunning themselves on a training holiday in Majorca. Showing no consideration for their fellow club mates who have to train back here in miserable conditions, they keep posting happy photos online. This is serious bad form. Hopefully they will take our feelings into account and take down this offensive material.

Monday Track Running: there was another big turn out for our Monday evening track session. We did a long distance set consisting of 3000m x 2, plus various warm-up and drill activities. Thanks to everyone for making the effort to be there.

Bike Racing: Just two club members were in action this weekend. Kevin Moyles took part in the A3 Dunsany GP race near Dublin. Kevin was unlucky not to score after the breakaway group he was in was caught in the last 1km. Shane Scully was also racing in the Shay Elliot Memorial race in Bray. This is one of Ireland’s most prestigious one day events and attracts many of the countries top A1/A2 riders. Shane did well on this hilly course finishing 16th overall and 4th A2 despite a crash 100m from the line – read his race report.

Next up - Limerick Summer league on Tuesday, Roll over session on Thursday, Crotty Cup on Saturday – link to race details, Sunday TBC

The cycle route for tomorrow morning is:

Nenagh – Birdhill – Ballina – Newtown – Nenagh

Dan Hogan will be calling the cycle on Saturday. It will be a warm up cycle to Birdhill, then at the round-about in Birdhill we will head up to the bypass round-about where we will be doing hill sets. We will complete between 4 – 6 sets.  Everyone will do it according to their own ability, with no pressure. When sets are finished we will continue into Ballina and then head back to Nenagh via Newtown. Distance is between 41 and 46 miles including hill sets.

There were 12 people out for the roll over session this evening. The low turn out meant that it was hard to create two groups, so in the end the session just didn’t work well for some. For the main group, we had quite a punishing work out with a very strong head wind for most of the rolling over. Plenty of lads are starting to show some good form now so keep it up!

Like all training sessions that the club organise, if they are not supported then they are changed or cancelled. This is the 2nd week in a row of low-ish numbers for training on this evening so we are going to cancel the official club training on Thursdays until further notice. The committee will see if it’s worth trying to organise something in the future. Until then you can opt to:

• organise your own meet-up
• join up with the North Tipp Wheelers. Once again we strongly advise our members to join the Wheelers. They have a race season in full flow at the moment on Thursday evenings. These races would really help your cycling fitness. Check out their website or Facebook page for more details.

Remember there is already official cycling on Tuesdays at 6:00pm from Moynans and Saturdays at 9:00am from the pool (and Sundays with the Wheelers) and we will also have Wednesday cycling as part of our tri series, so maybe missing out on the Thursday ain’t such a bad thing!!

Bike Racing Team: We will be continuing on with the roll over sessions at 6:30pm on Thursdays. There will be just one fast group and the average pace will be 22 – 24 mph. As per usual there will be no waiting for anyone. Combine the Tuesday and Thursday roll over sessions each week for the next few weeks and you should soon see the benefits at the weekend races.

Update: This evening’s cycle will almost certainly be going ahead. Just make sure you wear gear that suits the weather. If for some reason a tornado/hurricane appears likely we will update the website with a cancellation notice.

Thursday Cycling: Roll Over Session – The first of our Nenagh-Roscrea-Nenagh roll over sessions starts tomorrow May 9th at 6:30pm from the swimming pool. These sessions are excellent for building your fitness on the bike and are not to be missed. Cost = €0 (payable by cheque).

For  those of you that have not taken part before – we cycle together from the swimming pool at 6:30pm out to Dunkerrin. We will stop there for a few minutes and divide everyone into large ability based groups. Don’t worry you can go in whichever group you want. The slower groups will be let off first and they will receive a large time handicap. Each group has to work together to try and stay away.

The more people we have out for this the better. So try and give it a go for the first week at least!

Rás Marshalls Needed: As most of you know, the An Post Rás is coming to Nenagh very soon. Stage 2 will be finishing in Nenagh on Monday, May 20th. The Rás race committee have asked for our club to provide some marshalls for the race finish in Nenagh if we can. Most of ye have valuable left/right pointing experience from marshalling the North Tipp Sprint so those kind of top level marshalling skills are needed here. Helping to promote cycling in the town helps to promote what we offer in our club so please make yourself available from 1:00pm to 3:30pm on Monday if you can.

Shane is putting together a list of volunteers from the club. If you can help out then text him at 087 2605743.

Tour of Lough Derg: The annual Tour of Lough Derg takes place this year on Sunday, May 26th. This is organised by our friends in the North Tipp Wheelers and is a very popular event with our club members. I think we had close to 20 taking part last year so make sure you make yourself available. Visit their Facebook page for more details

We hope that you all had a good bank holiday weekend. Whether you were racing or taking it easy, we hope you are ready to get stuck back into the routine of training.

Club Events: The club would appeal to its members to make a special effort to attend club events. These events are highlighted in the top post on this website. We are starting a roll over session on Thursday and the first official lake swim on Sunday. Try to make it if you can.

Lake Swimming: The lake is starting to warm-up nicely in advance of our first official dip of the year on May 12th at 6:00pm in Youghal. Try and buy a wetsuit asap. For those of you that have not swam open water before you should try and practice out in Dromineer beforehand from pier to pier, as you can stand up at all times. Don’t presume that you will be fine!

Run Racing: The Great Limerick Run took place on Sunday and the club had 6 representatives in the half marathon – Johnny Meagher, Eddie Tucker, Benny Delaney, Mary Donnellan, Mary Cahalan & Majella Moyles. Luckily, none of them disgraced the club!!

North Tipperary VEC awards 2013: Killian Cullagh won an individual sports award last week. I think it was for greco-roman wrestling. Well done Killian!

Saturday Cycle: A dozen cyclists left the pool and the route headed for Latteragh and Seanin’s Hill. A stop was called at the start of the hill and people were unsure of the purpose. Was it to take on advise from Dan on the best way to get up while keeping your heart rate down, or would there be a little prayer group looking for divine help?  It actually proved to be a very early “comfort stop” for some of the lads. The hill wasn’t so bad in the wind up, with everyone going at their own pace. There was agreement at the top to alter the planned route slightly (sorry Majella). Instead of Dunkerrin the route went Moneygall and then Cloughjordan.

Roll over went well with fairly constant change at the front and this helped to keep the group together. Mileage was added out the Portumna road and then on to Terryglass. The rolling route to Coolbawn was tough but enjoyable as the day got brighter. At Coolbawn a “King of the Hill” competition was suggested and there was lots of flat out cycling to Puckane (no prizes as to who won… it starts with “D” and ends with “N”). A steady warm down back to Nenagh saw a distance of 54 miles at 16mph taking about 3.4 hours.

Bike Racing: Shane Scully, Gary Scully, Eoin Woolley and Keith Butler were the only lads in bike racing action this weekend. All 4 took part in the tough Kanturk 3 Day. Unfortunately, Keith thought the race was called the Kanturk 1 Day and bailed out after just one day. Although in fairness to Keith, that was one better than Kenneth Kennedy’s Kanturk 0 Day. Well done to both lads for their efforts – it’s the thought that counts!!

The race itself involved 4 stages over 3 days. Shane (read Shane’s race report) and Gary were very active in most stages of the A2/A3 race but in the end their efforts came up short. Gary finished in 33rd and Shane was 37th. Eoin Woolley finished in the bunch on each day of the A4 race and ended up in 36th position in the final GC. Keith finished safely in the bunch in stage 1.

Next up:

• Tuesday: Limerick Summer League
• Thursday: Club roll over session on Thursday
• Sunday: Karl McCarthy / Jim O’Leary Memorial – Whitechurch, Co. Cork.