Racing from the Heart

Well August '05 will go down as a landmark month in my life. Several reasons, lets just say for now that there has been a lot of soul searching, and also some answers found!

Yeppoon Half Ironman was right in the middle, my first race in the open category which ended up with a solid result of 5th. That has a nice kind of clarity to it; not having to say "I finished 7th overall, won 25-29 and was the 2nd age grouper home etc etc..."

I had an excellent race. Plenty of time to warm up including a 1.5km beach walk which I jogged with my good friend Phil Dove. We met the previous year racing as age groupers at the same race and he shared some of his racing philosophy with me on the way to the start. I was pretty pumped on the start line, thinking "this is it, my first pro start...". It was a buzz when the gun went - RACE UNDERWAY! The water was pretty choppy and the swim seemed to last forever, especially considering there was supposed to be a strong following current! I exited with a few other guys. I was 13th onto the bike and settled into race rhythm. My SRM's were giving some bizarre power readings so I just rode by feel. Phil was a minute ahead of me onto the ride but he was going like a train, on his way to the 2nd fastest bike split of the day and 4th overall.

By the 3rd lap I was starting to catch plenty of people who had gone hard at the start of the bike leg and also Timmy Porter (from HERT - my old training group) fresh out of the sin bin where he had been 'resting' for 5 minutes, tut tut! Dan McGuigan (from Aeromax - my new training group) was riding strong and caught me near the end of the ride. He led the charge to T2 and we started the run together despite his brief but intimate encounter with the tarmac in the vicintiy of the dismount line. Tim was around 50m behind and we set off for 3 laps of the resort and surrounding bushland. Dan was running strong and turned the screw a bit heading into the bush on lap 1. At one point it was all I could do to stay with him and I hoped we'd be able to work together into the top 5. Dan eased the pace slightly and I took the lead but after a few hundred metres there was no more Dan.

Tim was always in the back of my mind and sure enough, he soon came by at a decent pace. I decided to let him go and focused on running well in my own rhythm. If I'm honest, I probably wouldn't have been able to match his pace for long so I decided to be patient. On the last lap I passed Matt Clark to move into 6th and later spotted Timmy through the bush, about 100m ahead. Yeppoon has one of those run courses with limited visibility, so Tim was actually quite close by the time I saw him. This time it was my turn to surge past, doing my best to look invincible! Into the top 5 and that was where I finished.

Top placings were:

1. Leon Griffin - 4:14:22 (click to read his race report)
2. Cameron Watt - 4:14:35
3. Mathew Tippett - 4:15:58
4. Philip Dove - 4:16:30
5. Dunstan Bertschinger - 4:21:04
6. Tim Porter - 4:22:55
7. Jason Crowther - 4:23:28 (winner of 25-29)
8. Stephen Hemy - 4:23:45 (winner of 40-44)
9. Callum Millward - 4:24:28
10. Matthew Clark - 4:25:45
11.Dan McGuigan - 4:26:05
12. Brett Currie - 4:26:13 (winner of 30-34)

Some other solid results were

Ben Wearing - 3rd in age with 4:32:11
Greer Sansom - 4th in age with 5:11:04
Mel Ashton - 2nd Pro Female with 4:35:55

Special thanks to my sponsors, Ainsley, Robyn, LLewelyn and Russ at Inner City Cycles and Pauline and Murray from Pharmanex for their continued support.

My final preparations for the big race in Kona on Saturday 15th October are going really well. I'll be flying out on the 6th. More soon, including my latest racing photos...