gochNESSTRIathlon: Course, Route Profile & Map

Course & Elevation

The swim is 500 metres in the lake of the leisure pool, round two yellow buoys. The start is at 15:00, the last competition of the day and therefore the only one held entirely in afternoon light.

The bike course is not a circuit but a shuttle: a road corridor through Goch-Kessel with turnarounds at both ends, ridden out and back three times. The roads are closed and drafting is banned with a 12 metre zone. The elevation profile is effectively absent: 48 metres over 18 kilometres, 83 percent of the route flat, an altitude band of three metres between 12 and 15 above sea level. What makes this course hard is the six full about-turns, not its terrain.

The run is four laps along the lakeshore, likewise laid out as an out-and-back: a corridor of a good half kilometre, out and back, four times. Twenty-one metres of climbing across the whole distance, around 55 percent of it flat. Here too the turns set the rhythm; eight about-turns over five kilometres is a high count for a 5K.

Pacing Strategy

The 500 metres round the two yellow buoys are short and legible, but on a sprint they are long enough to spoil the start of the bike. Take the first hundred metres under control and use the buoys for regular sighting rather than as a sprint marker.

On the bike the shuttle format is the real subject. Three passes with turnarounds at both ends mean braking, turning and rebuilding speed six times, and it is that rebuilding that supplies the load a flat course otherwise lacks. Leave each turn with a hard kick and you have effectively ridden six over-threshold intervals. Brake late, turn tight and come back up to speed smoothly; in between, with drafting banned, only steady power in a stable position counts.

The third bike pass decides the race, and after that the second run lap. The classic trap is a 5K with eight turnarounds: each one breaks your pace, and the reflex is to lift again afterwards. Across four laps that adds up to a race run far more raggedly than planned. Hold the effort steady and accept that the turn costs time.

Training plan for gochNESSTRIathlon: 12-week build

The Jedermann distance takes roughly 55 to 85 minutes depending on level. The demand is a high and in principle even intensity, but it is chopped by fourteen about-turns in total into as many short reacceleration phases, physiologically a threshold effort with regular anaerobic spikes, even though not a metre of the course climbs to speak of.

The third bike pass and the first kilometre and a half of running decide it. Both sit past the halfway point, both on a course that offers no external structure at all, and both are carried purely by your own metering.

Bike training should therefore reproduce exactly that pattern: intervals of 4 to 6 minutes at threshold, each ending in a genuine 180-degree turn and a deliberately calm pick-up. Practise the turn physically (braking point, line, first pedal stroke) because it recurs six times on this course and is the biggest avoidable loss of time.

For the run, brick sessions of 15 to 25 minutes with turnarounds built in count for more than even laps, because a 5K with eight about-turns runs differently from any road race. And plan around the start time: 15:00 at the end of August on the Lower Rhine means a full morning of waiting, a warm racing phase and a lake that is warm rather than cold after the summer, so the wetsuit question may well go against the suit.