Race Coverage

Zipper Moves & Koalas...

Wednesday, 04 January 2017 23:10

By Heather Lendway (heatherlendway.com)

Ironman 70.3 World Championships Race Report - When I started racing 70.3 I never thought I would be in the mix for qualifying to race at the World Championships. A few really good races at the end of 2015 and early 2016 set me up well and I was ranked 20th going in.  My main season goal was to race well at Worlds.  With a few sub-par races heading into September I made a few tweaks to my training in hopes to give my body and mind the boost they needed heading into the big race.  Knowing I didn’t make the time adjustment well when I raced in Europe, I planned to leave for Australia as early as possible.  I arrived Tuesday morning, with the race on Sunday I had five days to adjust.  Overall the adjustment went well, I was tired early evening and up around 4 am, which lined up well with my race night sleep pattern....

Race morning I woke up around 4, ate my breakfast, drank plenty of water and jumped on my bike to cycle the 5K down to the race start. Upon arrival I went through my usual setup, got my GPS tracker and headed down to the beach.  All week the ocean waves were rough but on this day the ocean was more like glass.  They announced the pro men and sent them off to the start line.  The gun went off before some of the men even made it out to the line so I entered the water as soon as possible to make sure I didn’t have a delayed start.  The gun sounded and the 30 pro women were off.

1. I jumped on the feet of Leanda Cave shortly after the start and tried to maintain my position but people were quite aggressive. I decided it wasn’t worth the extra energy to battle arm to arm with a bunch of girls so I slowly dropped to the back of the pack. Being a calm wetsuit legal swim there were quite a few girls in the front pack that normally wouldn’t be. This made for a group of ten coming out of the water with 2 girls off the front. I was the 11th fastest swim but within 11 seconds of the third fastest swim, so that shows how tight this race was....READ MORE