| Paul Attard's Shep Half Ironman |
| Written by Paul Attard |
| Tuesday, 17 November 2009 09:37 |
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Well, its been a while since my last race report and there is a good reason for that - I haven’t raced in a while! With all this warm weather, the water in Lake Kialla reached a balmy 26 degrees, which meant definitely no wetsuits in the swim. Usually this would bother me as I definitely prefer a wetsuit swim but for some reason I was not concerned with it on this morning. I never do expect to come out of the swim in front but always hope to follow some good feet. However after the start, I missed finding good feet on the swim and ended up swimming most of the 1.9k swim on my own. This was still OK for me as I was only 1:30 down on the main players like Berkel, White and Thompson coming out of T1 into the bike leg. On the bike was where I wanted to improve most and I set about doing my own ride, not paying a lot of attention to what was going on up the road. When I came around the end of the first lap (first of three 30k loops) I noticed Jimmy Johnson was way ahead of the main group of about 6 or 7 riders and I was still trailing just 1:30 down and still on my own. At the end of lap 2 there was still the same gap and I was very happy to see that riders ahead had not put any time into me. It wasn’t until the 75k mark when David Meade rode up next to me. He had come out of the water a fair way behind me so he had had to put in a good effort to come up to me. It was useful at that point in the race to have someone to help me concentrate on keeping up the pace. Coming out of the transition into the run I was in 9th place and knew that not everyone ahead of me was going to run well. I set myself a goal of moving up to 5th place at the start of the run leg, which I thought was achievable. By the end of the 2nd lap I was in 5th place and slowly closing in on White and Thompson who were battling it out for 3rd place. This made it hard for me to catch them on the last lap as those two guys were going pretty hard to win that 3rd spot. As it turned out they did hold me off and I finished the half marathon in 5th spot 1hr18 with an overall time of 3hr58. This was a PB for me by 4 minutes and I could not really have asked for more. I again learnt a few things about racing at this HIM distance and look forward to making some more improvements in races to come.
See you all at the next race. Paul |
