Yes I know there are guys who are going to read this who know a lot about triathlon but, bare with me as I try to write this to suit all audiences. Well ….. Challenge Wanaka……..Why? I still don’t know, but I think as like most people who enter an Iron distance Race; also referred to as Long Distance, Challenge or Ironman, that is where it starts. Splashing out a ridiculous amount of cash to do nothing but stress and worry about the one million things that goes through your head. Adding that these days having to enter this distance race up to 12 months in advance you get months and months to stew over the decision you’ve just made. Well either way as it would be challenge Wanaka was to be my first “Iron Distance” race (still not sure what I was thinking)
Arriving home in late September, I was really keen to get into training. I made a promise to myself to have a really good crack at this triathlon thing and that was what I was going to do. I think the best thing was coming home to see all the old crew I hadn’t seen for 12 months as well as meeting all the new guys who had joined the Trinova family, which had grown out of control since I had been gone.
It was good to sit down with Rod and Higgo to go through my first plan and draw up a bit of a lead up for Wanaka and start to work on my weaknesses and my strengths. For those that know me in the triathlon world know that I struggle to run well, so one of the focuses for the prep was to really start to work on my run to bring it up to hopefully match my swim bike….The solution was simple……..kilometers…kilometers and more kilometers it’s no secret but in saying that it needs to carefully planned to prevent injury and overtraining.
I have been around triathlon for a couple of years and over the next few I hope to develop a long way in the sport thus maybe it would be good to give my insights to my first trip over the 3.8k/180k/42.2k distance. Going into Wanaka I really didn’t know much about what to expect. I mean you can be told so much and take in so much information from people who have been there before and what to expect but there is no real lesson like taking the journey, but anyway here goes.
The start of it all would probably be at the Forster Ultimate in October. About 3 weeks after we got back in the country and cutting a long story short the race matched a similar trend to most of the previous ones, a good swim and bike and try hold on with the run. I can’t really complain with the result overall, but deciding the day before to have a crack in the Open Category to guage the platform it was always going to be tough. I was off the bike in a good position after pushing hard, but as always that fall away pretty badly struggling through the 20 km, I was happy but knew there was work to. More or Less…….This was the beginning.
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