It has been a pretty long day, so I am not going to try and capture all the details of the day in this post. Rather this is more a brain dump of my impressions from the day. Tomorrow, once I have had a bit of time to think about it, I might have something more meaningful. I will also try and get my race report up as soon as possible.
So how did it go? Well, I got second in the 30-34 age group, which also happened to be 2nd Age-Grouper overall. That was good enough to get me 13th in the men and 16th overall. Yes I got beaten by some women, but when the women have names like Mel Hauschlildt and Annabel Luxford (1st and 3rd at the 70.3 World Champs earlier this year) you don't mind so much. My time was 4 hours 10 minutes and 30 seconds, which is a PB by a pretty massive 16 minutes or so, confirming that Mandurah is indeed a pretty quick course.
Going into the race my goals had been to break 4 hours 20, podium in my age group and be in the top 20 overall. I managed to achieve all of those goals, so I am pretty happy.
I have never really done a super fast course before, and I have always wondered what it would be like. Does it feel fast when you are on it, what makes it so fast etc. Well I can't speak for other fast courses, but I can say for Mandurah, it doesn't feel particularly fast when you are on it. It wasn't until I was into the last hour of the run that I realised I was looking at a good time. It is hard to put a finger on exactly what makes this a fast course. There are probably several contributing factors. For instance the swim is downstream, which means swim times are all a couple of minutes quicker than they would otherwise be. The run and the ride are both pretty flat, which certainly helps. However, the ride also tends to be quite wind effected, so whilst it is quick, it doesn't feel it. The ride is 1.5km short, which helps the times a bit. I guess it all adds up. I was surprised, whenever I have seen results of fast races I have always assumed there must have been 'a reason', ie lots of drafting, short course, something. But based on my experiences this weekend, I guess some courses just have a combination of factors that result in them being quick. Whatever the reason, I am certainly not going to knock back a 4 hours 10 minute result.
The other big bit of news out of this race is that I knocked back a Kona slot. Since Mandurah is the Australian Professional 70.3 Champs, there were actually Kona qualification slots on offer. My age group had two, since I came 2nd, I qualified for one of them. However, believe it or not, Kona just isn't a priority for me at the moment. I have thought long and hard about this, and discussed it at length with Daryl, and there are just other things I would prefer to be doing in the upcoming season. I may look back at this moment and really regret not taking the opportunity, but at the moment I am happy with my decision. I know every triathlete everywhere is supposed to want to go to Kona more than anything else in the world, but for me, at the moment, it isn't my goal. Hence my decision.
There is plenty more that I could say, particularly about how the various legs went etc, but I am pretty tired and it is getting late, so I think I might save most of that for the race report.
No comments:
Post a Comment