Valentine’s Day was Race 5 of the Gatorade series at Portarlington. Originally I planned to race in Hobart this weekend but this plan changed with TA’s late cancellation of the Tasmanian event. This was quite a disappointment as Hobart is a great venue for triathlon.  However my day at Portarlington has substantially helped me recover from this.

The first 10km saw a group of three of us working together with the youngest of us fading after a few kms, but he did help us quiet a bit in that early part of the cycle course. Around the 10km mark we finally caught the second group which had about 5 guys in it.  Together we were now about a 45 seconds down on the leaders. We started to work hard again once we got together and slowly we were reeling in the lead pack of about 4 guys.
We caught them with 200m to transition so there was no time to catch our breath at all. 
T2 was quick and we were out straight away. I was sitting in 5th place running up the stairs out of the transition zone.  All I wanted was to hang on for the first couple of km's, as I was confident I could out run them in the later part of the course provided I was there to do it. My legs started to come through at about the 3km mark and that was when I went to the front. I slowly picked up the pace to make the lead pack hurt a bit but not so much as to hurt myself. A few little surges and the lead pack starting to fall behind. I lost a little concentration and they took some of my lead back with 2km to go but they didn’t come close enough to worry me. I knew Leigh would be committed to having a stab in the final km, so I put the hammer down again but he kept coming. With the downhill finish all I had to do was let the legs roll over and take me to the finish line. (ed. sounds easy doesn’t it … 8km in 26:05 that’s 3:16 kms! .. eight of them in a row...).

And there it was my first Elite win in a Gatorade race. I was so happy with this result and am now really keen for last race of the series. I am now sitting either 2nd or third in the overall series point score, so to hold onto a podium finish in the series will be a great result after a few false hopes and race cancellations this season.