Masters Spotlight – Stephen Branagan

• Posted onjofrancis
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• onOctober 5, 2017
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Stephen Branagan is a Year 3 Masters athlete, who joined the Masters program in January this year, having historically been a coached athlete, working with Mike Redshaw.

At the start of this year, Stephen set himself some goals in terms of completion times and race performances (rather than AG placings).

They were:

Sprint: Sub 1:05

Olympic: Sub 2:30

70.3: Sub 5:00

140.6: Complete, but ideally sub 11:00.

As we come to the end of the season, he’s successfully hit three of the targets he set out to do:

Sprint: 1:03

Olympic: 2:28

70.3: 4:48

140.6: Not completed

In hindsight, he thinks his 70.3 goal wasn’t stretching enough as he had maybe underestimated his level of fitness.  He feels that he should have pushed towards the 4:45 mark!

All in all he’s had a good season of results and is totally moving forward in the right direction.

Stephen is now preparing for the 70.3 in Majorca on the 14th, with just over a week to go now and he’s been doing his sessions in extra layers to prepare for the heat over there, which is going to be a (hopefully welcome…) change from the current UK 10-14 degrees!

As for next year, he’s thinking of an early season race but has yet to decide on that.

Once he’s back from Majorca and has rested for a couple of weeks he’s going to sit down with his family and plan out what will work for them all, as he’s well aware that you have to work really hard to balance triathlon training and family life.

He’s said that IM70.3 Dublin will definitely be on his list in August 2018.  He moves up to the 35-39 AG next year, so it will be interesting to see how that affects his results. The 30-34 AG was very competitive this year (he was 20th in his AG but 120th out of 1600 at Dublin, so 20 of the top 120 overall were in his AG!).

Some early ideas for next season’s goals for Stephen are:

Ironman AWA Silver status

Sub 2:20 70.3 bike

Sub 1:25 21.1km run

Ironman Full!

We look forward to working with Stephen throughout the 2018 season, and have every confidence that he will be smashing his targets once again!