10th / 11th Canberra Weekend

Friday night was a late one at NumberWorks, finishing everything off for the end of term. I caught the late bus home and was forced to move to a higher seat when a fellow passenger evacuated his stomach. The bus driver kicked the offending passenger off at the next stop with 'All you had to do was ask and I'd have stopped the bus!" fair point...

Dan picked me + 2 bikes up in the morning for the drive down to Canberra. I stayed with Jaqui and Chris, two of Wendy's excellent friends. Chris led a group of us out for a tour on the mountain bikes, the highlight was a BMX track where I made and emergency landing and narrowly escaped a big stack after getting carried away on a big jump!

In the afternoon I registered, racked my bike and gave Ainsley & Richard a hand on the Inner City Cycles stand. That evening we were treated to a gourmet Pasta feast at the Pulkkinen residence. Wendy is part of a wonderful group of friends who were all involved in the 1/2 Ironman in capacities including hosts, photographer, support crew, relay team and full distance competitors. AJ, Dan, Kerry, Mark and Wendy completed the full event and all had really positive experiences that were enjoyed by the whole group. Notably Wendy and AJ both 'popped their 1/2 IM cherries' with big smiles and very respectable performances.

I had a good swim but took a wrong turn on the bike course. This was 100% my own fault, as I hadn't driven the course or checked the map, but certainly wasn't helped by the illogical signage and general confusion. I ended up riding with Aeromax team mate Chris Shaw and we were several km past the point of error by the time we realised we had missed 20km of the course!

Dunstan "That sucks. Were you racing for an Ironman slot?"
Shawey "Nah, I already qualified at Port Mac Half."
Dunstan "Well I can't be bothered to go back now, what say we head back to transition and do the run anyway?"

We rode into T2 in 5th place overall and for a while the crowd and announcer thought we were having the race of our lives and had made up 15+ minutes on the pros but our amusement soon gave the game away. We explained our circumstances to the TA officials, gave our recommendations for improvements to signage and were stripped of our timing chips before we were allowed to progress to the run.

Belinda won her age group by 22 minutes.

I'll put some more results here soon - has anyone compiled them yet?