2013 - A Year in Review

Chairman of Triangle Triathlon Club

AGM 14th November 2013

Railway Arms Coleraine

This is the report of the outgoing chair of the Triangle Triathlon Club for the sporting years of 2013.

For the last year this sporting club has seen many initiatives undertaken by club members both sporting and organisational. A Triangle of course has three sides and is an entirely appropriate sign to symbolise our club. Firstly in our sport we have three different disciplines and we cater for swimmers with pool time in Coleraine in Magherafelt, Limavady and Ballymoney. We also cater for bikers and runners with our wonderful blend of geography and natural history.

Secondly we cater for a Triangle of abilities we have a broad base of first timers and novices (I envy the fact that many of them will be achieving PB’s practicality every month!) half way up the Triangle we have an established coterie of season campaigners who had been ploughing a somewhat lonely furrow for several decades but who now find themselves in the fastest growing sport in the west; and thirdly at the top of the Triangle we have an elite few who can podium in big races and who regularly bring home silverware in their kit bag.

In another look at the three sides of the Triangle, it could be said that we organise annually races of a high quality which cater for the three different distances generally recognised in Triathlon. Firstly the sprint race in Limavady. Secondly the Olympic distance race in Portrush and thirdly the middle distance and long Ironman distance race organised by Conal in Grimsport but we also now have an equally successful kids race in Limavady so expertly organised by Mervyn, Ian, Catherine and Brian so maybe we should be calling ourselves the Quadrangle Club!

As we look back in 2013 we should also look forward to the 2014 season.

Where are we as a club and where do we want to be in a year’s time? As a club I feel we reached many significant developmental milestones in the last year namely three great coaching seminars (Tommy Evans University of Ulster, Oliver Harkin in Magherafelt and Aaron Ballantine University of Ulster) we showed that in the words of Aaron, “it’s not just about the swim bike and run” it’s about the incremental gains that can be accommodated by looking at nutrition, phycology strength and condition etc.

The second major milestone was the lunch of our club website and for this we are indebted to our incredibly hard working and innovative secretary, Brain Scullion the website is truly professional and stands comparison with any clubs site anywhere. In fact I think it is a lot better than the TI version currently available!

The third development is inextricably linked with the website i.e. athlete of the month. Hopefully we will have the opportunity of highlighting the different contributions our athletes make as well as encouraging other athletes who aspire to be even better.

Every club needs a sound finical footing and thanks to Allison, we know our club accounts are in apple pie order and everything is transparent and available for scrutiny and we have the finance there in place if we wish to invest in anything to make our club even stronger.

I would also like to thank Alistair for his unsung work of looking after the clocks and making them available for hire those clocks certainly where a worthy investment all those years ago.

We are all proud to wear the red and black of the TTC and I know tonight we will be making further decisions on Tri Suits. I know that Gavin who can’t be here tonight has worked tirelessly to source samples and has gone the extra mile to make sure that we have the best kit available. It’s not an easy job to please everybody with quality and price and we should all be indebted to him.

We are proud to be an affiliated club of Triathlon Ireland, a remarkably successful organisation which has catapulted a neighbour of ours, Aileen Reid from Derry, into the top ten in the world and is also helping to ensure that Gavin Nobel, Bryan Keen and Conor Murphy have a great chance of qualification for the Olympics in Rio in 2016

We should not forget the sterling work that Conal Heatly has done for Triathlon Ireland as the secretary until his retirement relatively recently and we wish both Conal and Stuart Tosh MBE all the best for their busy year with the commonwealth games in Glasgow in 2014

So we have a bright present but can we have an even brighter future? Hopefully Mervyn and his cohorts Limavady can make a junior section in Limavady a reality. It will mean a lot of hard work and even more responsibility but we have the necessary child protection officers in place and more importantly we have the amplitude and the willingness to give up an hour or so on a Friday night to set up the structures and to look after the future superstars of tomorrow.

We are all very well aware of the positive advantages of club membership namely camaraderie and companionship. We all have the knowledge that we push ourselves harder when where’re training with our mates and there are the whole social advantages of interaction rather than solitary pursuit

They say there’s nothing quite as lonely as the loneliness of the long distance solo swimmer biker or runner! We must never forgot however the significance of a quite word of encouragement and a smile of a club member it really could make all the difference to them.

In conclusion it has been an honour to serve this club we haven’t got everything right but we do have a solid platform to push on in 2014 from the point of view of an our athletes and form the point of view of our race organisers and most importantly of all as the point of view of we ordinary mortals who feel better calling ourselves member of the TTC, a club we are all proud to serve.

Thank you.