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?

This time there were no traffic problems and I got there in plenty of time. Racked bike, sorted kit, drank coffee. Bumped into Stuart from the Viceroys who was also racing and caused confusion because I thought his name was Sean – this wouldn’t have been a problem except that he was there with his mate who is called Sean. Noticed the strong Westerly wind that was a-blowing: after heat (year 1) and rain (year 2) the theme for this year was clearly to be wind. Wettie on and into the lake and then some kind of delay… we ended up all treading water for about 10 minutes and I was starting to get cold when finally the horn went and so did we. Nice civilised swim with little in the way of martial arts required, I only had a little confusion because one of the buoys was meant to be red (yellow buoy go left, red buoy go right) but this turned out to be a funny joke because it was actually a yellow buoy with a red stripe round it and from the water you could only see the yellow bit. That aside I was out in 36 minutes which is par for the course for me. T1 involved a little messing around and I somehow managed to take two minutes doing I don’t know what. 

Hop on the bike, oh yes, here we go, onto the dual carriageway, get the hammer down, whizz round the first turnaround and bddda bdddddda bddda flat back tyre. Arse. Two problems presented themselves: firstly I was on a dual carriageway next to an armco barrier with nowhere safe to get off the road to fix the flat and secondly getting the back wheel out of my TT bike is a colossal PITA (horizontal dropouts plus a super-duper aero brake that you have to take partly to pieces to get the wheel out). After looking around I really didn’t have any option but to do the change in the road, and the pfaffing associated with getting the wheel out and then in again, and then getting the brake back together (this requires three hands: one to hold the bike, one to squeeze the callipers together and one to clip the little clippy thing so that it works properly) meant that the change took 10 minutes. Boo! I didn’t want to just ditch the tube by the road (littering doncha know) so I stuffed it down the front of my trisuit, meaning that I spent the rest of the bike looking like a suspiciously stubbly Amazon.

Back on and moving again and the bike leg was all about the wind: either trying to stay as aero as possible and slogging into it at something approaching walking speed or whizzing along with it on your back rather faster. As the evening went on the sun set rather prettily over the Dartford Marshes and the wind peaked at about lap 6 or seven when it was a real gale – it slackened off a bit as the night got darker, which was a relief, but there was now an exciting new challenge because the streetlights didn’t get turned on on the dual carriageway. The council had said that they would be on from dusk until midnight but this turned out not to be the case and there was a fair bit of riding that was in complete darkness. This wouldn’t have been a problem had there not been some people without lights on their bikes… the section with the tailwind was the most entertaining, flying into the darkness at warp 6 and hoping not to hit anyone. For the last two laps I hung back behind other riders (probably doing to full distance) who had really bright MTB lights on for this section so that I could use them to get warning of any ninja riders who would otherwise appear mysteriously out of the shadows rather too suddenly.

Finally finished lap 10 and swung into T2 for a total bike split of 3:06, not too bad given the wind and the 10 minutes flat fixing time. For reference I had a 2:49 split in 2012 when there was no wind although the course was somewhat different that year (with over 100 speed bumps just on the half: thankfully they took that bit out). I’d been suffering for the last couple of laps and really feeling the lack of training time on the TT bike in my lower back, so I was not looking forward to the run. Fortunately one of my competitors took pity on me and helped me to avoid having to do any of that running stuff by racking his bike right in my spot and then putting his stuff on top of mine. I ran up and down the racks a couple of times in confusion until I worked out what had happened and then had to ask him nicely to move his bike etc. which he did with very little grace. This all led to further delays and a 4 minute T2. Sadly no-one else intervened so I had little choice but to get up on my hind legs and start running. I didn’t feel great but was going OK and started knocking out the kms at between 4:15 and 4:30 pace. I overtook Stuart after a few ks, then at the end of lap 2 he went in front of me when I slowed at the drinks station. I slowed down a bit on lap 3 and was generally feeling knackered but perked up once I had a quick pitstop at the start of lap 4. Overtook Stuart again (he’d had some GI trouble) and ran nice and hard all the way in for a final run split of 1:30:19. Overall time was 5:20 for 34th place which I am well pleased with considering the way the year’s gone so far.

As raced and reported by Rob Knell