Martyn Brunt on the curse of the last-minute cancellation

Despite doing races since 2000 BC (Before Cleats) when triathletes in Speedos roamed the earth, the number of cancelled events I’ve experienced has been mercifully few.

In all the years I’ve been toiling away in the bottom half of my various age-groups, I can genuinely only think of a handful of occasions where I experienced that bittersweet moment of learning that a race isn’t going ahead.

‘Bittersweet’ because your disappointment at not being able to race is mixed with secret feelings of relief that you have a guilt-free escape from going through the agony of leaping into a cold lake and shivering your way off on your bike.

I think that triathlon, being three sports suffers fewer cancellations than single-discipline sports because if you can’t do one part of the race, you might still be able to do the others.

As such I’ve seen creative race organisers manage to cope with foggy lakes, rough seas, flooded run courses and gale-force winds by pulling a last-minute switch to aquathlons, aquabikes and duathlons out of the bag.

Some of the more memorable late-race changes I’ve experienced include:

• A tri in Weymouth which became a swim/bike when the run had to be abandoned after armed police raided a house on the run course and blocked the street off.
• An iron-distance race in the desert in Nevada in 2011, which was switched to a bike/run after a sudden drop in temperature to zero – yes zero – meant the swim had to be abandoned because the temperature difference between still-toasty lake and freezing desert air was too great for sensitive American bodies.
• A standard-distance tri near Telford which became a sprint distance run after the run-leaders found their way through a park gate obstructed by a flasher wearing a bin bag and suspenders.

All this is on my mind because I’ve just experienced a last-minute race cancellation thanks to Storm Babet. The race in question was the Dramathon – a trail marathon around whisky distilleries in Speyside (if anyone can think of a better reason to go running I’d like to hear it).

“I felt for the race organisers who had to watch me drink all their Balvennie”

It’s a race I’ve done before and one at which, as well as the usual race goodies of T-shirt and medal, you get eight whisky miniatures at the finish, a thoroughly civilised way to dull any post-race aches and pains from 26 miles of highland trails.

I thoroughly enjoyed it the first time I did it – I think, I don’t actually remember that much after deciding that despite not being in pain, I’d better drink my miniatures just in case.

This time alas, despite the storm having passed and left the course sodden but runnable, we arrived to find that some further and un-forecasted heavy rain on top of already wet ground had flooded parts of the course and left it impassable to all but the most determined swimmer.

The organisers did their best to soften the blow of the late cancellation by offering a free dram of Balvennie to anyone who came along to the race HQ in the morning to hand their timing chip in.

Not everyone fancied a whisky that early in the day, but I had no such qualms, after all if it’s socially acceptable to drink in airport lounges at seven in the morning I don’t see why a village hall in Dufftown should be any different.

I really felt for the race organisers who had done everything possible to put the race on, who were ready to stand out in the pouring rain and marshal us as we sludged past, and who had to watch a man from Coventry drink all their Balvennie after saying, ‘I’ll have theirs’ whenever a chip-returning runner declined a drink.

It was the right decision to cancel though, the weather was still wild and it’s not as though they could switch the race to a different discipline.

I’ll definitely be back to do it next year – weather and not being blacklisted by race organisers permitting.

Top illustration credit: Dan Seex