Peaking Ducks. My awesome team for this years Busselton Half Ironman. Today was race day and needless to say I was a nervous wreck! I was up at 5 buzzing around while the rest if my family was getting ready to head off for my bro and dad's early start. It was a long nervous wait not only for for my team to start at 10.30 but then for my run to start at around 1.30, depending on how the race unfolded for my team.
And it unfolded pretty well. Our swimmer, though in June final wave to set off and with a lot of traffic ahead if her, came out as the second female, behind another girl we race often, and could pretty much just hand first place to before we even hit the water. So happy with that start. Cyclist went out, and came through on here first lap right on schedule. I watched her speed by and then I had 1 hour 20mins so sort myself out.
With about 25mins before we expected her in, I did my warm up, changed my shoes and headed into transition with 15minutes to wait. Longest 15 minutes of my life. We had to stand back out of the changeover area until we saw our cyclist enter transition, which was a good 300m down the other end of the big racks, so you can imagine the chaos with hundreds of runners straining to look for the cyclists, a whole lot of nervous energy going on. And we couldn't help but laugh when one runner was yet to make it into transition and his poor cyclists was standing there waiting for at least 5 minutes.
Cyclist came in and ran down to meet me where I changed over the timing chip and launched off into this half marathon. My course was made up of three 7km laps. First lap - good! Still happy and smiling. Second - starting to hurt. Third - well the first half was not fun, but when I made it to the turn around point and knew I only had 3.5km to go...second wind. Picked it up with 1.5km to go and gave what I had left in the last 500m down the finish shoot where my team joined me.
Extremely proud with the effort we'd put in, and we came 4th. Couldn't be happier. Also happy to say I finished the run in 1 hour 39 mins 18 secs, which was 11 minutes faster then what I was aiming for.
So the Peaking Ducks had a great day out, and I am thankful to have been a part of such a committed and hardworking team.
As Liz and I said you had the hardest leg. As a runner myself I know first hand how incredible it is that you can just turn yourself from a swimmer to a 10km runner into a Half Marathon runner the latter part (the running) in the space of just 5 weeks! Amazing!! So glad I was part of your team ... lets try for podium next year huh? :) xx
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