Shoalwater Olympic Distance

Shoalwater Olympic Distance is now done and dusted. It was only a little event so I won't put together a proper race report for it. This post will act in lieu of a full blown report.

Race went well, once it got started (more on that later). I came across the line in 3rd with a time of about 2:01.50 ish (official results aren't out yet).

This is my first Olympic Distance, which most people I have told find hard to believe, but it is a distance that I have never quite got around to racing before. Whenever they have been on in the past I seem to have been injured, or away etc. As such I have always been a little apprehensive about the distance, since my understanding of how to race an Olympic Distance is:

Start
Go flat out
Stop
Collapse

However, despite my apprehensition, this race was a good lead up to Bussleton 70.3 (3 weeks away) and I needed some race practice, so it was a good race to do.

The day got off to a little bit of a shaky start because we were delayed by almost an hour on the start line due to the St John's Ambulance not turning up. Unfortunately, but understandably, the race couldn't be started without them. Still the organisers scrambled their resources and got an ambulance there as soon as possible. So we got underway just after 8:00am.

The Shoalwater course looks a bit like this:

Two laps of a triangular 750m course in the Shoalwater Marine Reserve. Nice protected water, sandy bottom with sea grass, very pleasant. Run up and around a marker on the beach between laps.

Bike is 5 (yes 5) laps of 8km. The lap is pretty flat (164m elevation gain over the entire 40km). Each lap has two hairpin 180 degree turns, a chicane that you go through twice and a number of 90 degree corners. In short you spend a lot of time braking and then accelerating.

The run leg is a simple 3 x 3.3km run. Nothing complicated.

All up it is a fun little race. It is the closest thing I have found outside of Darwin to a Darwin race. Definitely a club race, which means it is a bit smaller and a bit more relaxed. Still all the important bits organisationally, aid station on the run, timing chips etc. But just a very relaxed feel.

Once we got going my race went more or less to plan. The plan by the way was, swim hard, ride as hard as I could for as long as I could. Run as hard as I could for as long as I could. Pretty simple really.

Once we got swimming it settled pretty quickly to a pack of three. Myself and Ashan (from Daryl's squad) got a nice draft around the first half of the swim. Heading back in for the 2nd lap I took over the lead about half way around and led the other two around for the rest of the lap. We exited together and headed to the bikes. I am not sure of my swim time yet, but it must have been a little bit under 20 minutes.

I managed to get onto the bike first and held my lead for about half a lap. About halfway around the first lap I got overtaken by the eventual winner. I held onto him for about another half a lap, but gradually lost distance to him. By the end of the bike he was a long way in front. I felt okay on the bike, but by lap four was starting to hurt on the headwind sections and any of the little rises. Still there were enough downhills and tail wind sections to ease the pain. With such a short lap you were never having to fight the wind for long. It meant you could grit your teeth and tough it out.

Because the bike course has so many laps we started getting mixed up with the rest of the field once we started the second lap. That made keeping track of who was just behind you and who was a lap down on you a bit tricky. Even still by the end of the bike I was pretty sure that I hadn't lost much distance to anyone, except possibly one guy. Coming in off the bike this was proven true as he rolled in just behind me. Darn I thought, I really don't want to get into a foot race with somebody. Oh well, that is what I had.

The bike was about 1:02 or so by the way.

Heading into the run I was all about just tapping out a rhythm. I have only just started running again and so I was a bit unsure about how my body would react. Still in the first couple of kms it seemed to be going okay. The nice thing with having 3 laps on the run means you can have a good look at who is behind you at each turn. By the end of the first lap I had a good feel for who I had to look out for. The guy who had come into transition with me was falling away and so I was comfortably in second. Going into the second lap I just concentrated on holding pace and holding my place. Lap two hurt a bit, but by the end of it I was still second and hadn't seemed to have lost any more ground to anyone. Heading into the third and final lap I was feeling good, pace was holding and the end was in sight. Things were feeling a bit easier. With a couple of kms to go a guy came flying past and I wasn't sure if I had just been overtaken or whether he was a lap down, but either way he was going too quick for me to pull in. Turns out I had just been overtaken. Oh well. The last couple of kms passed well enough. I wasn't overtaken by anyone else and the pace held. I very gratefully crossed the line in 3rd with a time of 2:01.50ish. My run had been just under 39 minutes, but according to my Garmin was also about 350m short. Still pretty happy with that.

The race was won in about 1 hour 56, second came in almost exactly on 2 hours. For me I was just happy to anywhere near 2 hours. Heading into the race that had been my goal, but I really had been unsure just how it would go. As a lead into Busselton it was just about perfect. I still have some work to do, but luckily I still have a few weeks to do it.

I reckon three weeks is more than enough.