Planet X sponsored Triathlete Brian McCrystal was in the warehouse on Friday, having his bike tweaked and picking up some new gear before he headed off to the Staffordshire Ironman on Sunday. He's a bit quick, so we took the opportunity to ask him a few questions before he dashed off for a last minute training ride.

How did you get into triathlon?
I've always been sporty, I played a lot of football as a youth and was on the books at Leeds. But my knees had other ideas so I had to look around for something lower impact and I quit soccer in 2009. Cycling is popular where I'm from, there's a good local scene and I fell into it and from cycling move into triathlon eventually.

Did you start off doing road races and move up, what was the progression?
I started off just riding the bike. I remember I took part in a Gran Fondo back in 2010 and got to ride along with your man Jamie Burrow. It was great to be riding with the pros, you got an idea of how fast they really were; I had nothing like that in my legs back then.

I started training, got my licence, doing local races, and slowly moved up. At first, it was just road racing, then I started triathlon. I did the RAS in 2015, I wore the mountain jersey for a bit. The RAS is a real slugfest, everyone going off the front like crazy in every stage. You're always chasing some idiot down, it's just brutal.

How did you go from your first triathlon to Ironman, what's your training regime?
It's a natural progression, everyone's looking to do Ironman, it's the big named event, isn't it. I worked on my swim, my bike was always pretty strong, and eventually, you increase the training until you're capable of doing the distance. I have a young family and I work so I'm training 12-15 hours a work. I train hard, quality over quantity.

We took a look at your bike before and you're running a 58t on the front?
I'm a big lad, I'm tall, I'm nearly 90kg I don't have a problem pushing such a big gear. On some courses there's time to be made pushing a bigger gear and I'm looking to make up as much time as possible on the bike split, the bike is my strongest segment.

58 is a massive gear, what's your FTP?
I'm around 420 watts on the bike.

That's pro rider levels?
I suppose so. I'm not pro-rider light though.

How has your training been going, you're doing the Staffs 70.3 this Sunday, aren't you?
I'm in good form on the bike. I did a 20:20 10km time trial midweek and I've been happy with my swims lately. I should do alright. There's a lot of good racers competing this weekend, I'll be happy with a top five. It depends on how close I can get to the pros on the bike. There's a definite advantage to being up with the pros on the bike and close to the camera motorbikes. If my runs holds up it should be good, let's see how it goes.

Bryan put in a solid effort on Sunday, he wasn't pleased with his results on the hottest day of the year, but to us it looks good. His splits are shown below. You can follow him via his Twitter and see his race report on his Facebook page.

19 June 2017