m y T r i L i f e

Victor Harbor Triathlon

Another great weekend of racing in beautiful South Australia! This time, in a great resort town about 80km south of Adelaide. Arriving the day before the race, Heather and I had some time to look to visit Granite Island, which contains a colony of penguins. I'm not sure what penguins are doing this far north and in this hot of climate though... don't they like the cold water and ice? On our short tour of the island we found one hiding from the mid-day sun in a burrow. Cool... I've seen a real live penguin now.


Anyways... the race was the largest of the season here.. well over 500 people, with 200+ in the Oly distance. Once again, I decided to race in the "open" category for fun. Ooops. Probably not a good idea, as the lake temperature was 21.7 degrees, meaning open category wasn't allowed to wear wetsuits. I had a plan to go like hell at the start and hang onto a set of feet for as long as possible.. and hope the pace would slow. Umm.. yeah. I was dropped in about 20sec. It was a nice lonely swim until the 750m buoy when the lead women blew by. I tried to hang onto their feet... that lasted about 20sec too! I came out of the water in just under 24 minutes. Not bad for me, given a non-wettie swim... but I'm a little pissed at it. Needless to say.. I need to work harder on my swim.

With all the open men long gone from transition, I was racing with the lead women. There are some darn fit elite women here in South Australia... the third place girl dropped me like stone on the first hill. Did I mention the "change" in weather? Yep, seems every time I have a race or a long ride on the schedule, the usually perfect SA weather goes to crap. Well... it wasn't a bad change.. the air temperature was cool for fast racing, but the cross-winds on parts of the bike made things a bit squirrely with the Zipps... sometimes I wish I weighed a few more kilos to steady the bike.

As it played out... I didn't get passed all day. I just held my position on the bike, eventually bringing the 3rd place woman back, then played leap-frog with her on the run before finally pulling ahead in the last 2km. My run felt a lot better than my bike this time.... a bit of speedwork has helped for sure.

Tribe club championship coming up this weekend, then a 4km ocean swim the week after that... woo! Good thing I have all this racing, as I'm getting a lot less training in, due to being extremely busy with work for the first time in several months. I guess I can't complain... I need the billable hours.

That's all for now.. bedtime!

posted by Greg Nicholson @ 3/14/2007