The Midnight Man is an especially eccentric race even for a triathlon: starting at six in the evening with a full distance option running right through the night and a half distance option finishing (hopefully) sometime before midnight (also a quarter distance option but we’ll disregard that as beneath us).

The whole race is set in a small industrial estate in Dartford in the shadow of the QE2 Bridge: the swim is two or four laps of a small lake, the bike is ten or twenty laps of an “H” shaped loop incorporating several kilometres on one side of a dual carriageway which is closed to traffic and the run is four or eight laps of a course that mostly resembles a dropped piece of string in complexity. All in all a somewhat strange but pleasantly low-key race with a good atmosphere and very little BS. I did the half distance race in 2012 when it was the hottest weekend of the year and had a reasonable race until I crashed and burned halfway around the run. Last year I was signed up for the full but didn’t make it because someone drove a crane onto a concrete lane divider on the M25 and wedged the whole thing: despite leaving Hersham at 2:30 for a 6PM start I was still 25 miles away when the race started, meaning that I got to miss the 5 hours of torrential rain that everyone “enjoyed” that evening. This year I signed for the half distance at rather short notice: having been ill for three months and only starting training again early in July I was getting back into fitness and wanted to see how I was getting on, and what better way to test your fitness than with a half ironman? Continue reading →