XTERRA New Zealand Championships - Triathlon

Had a fantastic swim, very happy with the pacing, breathing etc really starting to see the swimming coming together, now to work on the speed.

Improvements will come as I work more on technique but happy to have shaved 12 minutes off last years swim time and very little breastroke involed.

There was a fairly good run from the beach to transition which was just as well as the zipper got stuck on the wetsuit but come unstuck with enough time to remove the top half before reaching the bike. It was pretty chilly yesterday and being off-road there is more to put on such as arm warmers, glovers, camelbak, socks etc etc so a bit slower than normal but happy with the transition.

Pretty happy with the bike leg, didn't push it too hard to start with but was feeling a bit tired and sore towards the end and happy to get off the bike.

Probably need to do some more faster endurance races, the technical aspects were fine and I knew the course inside out, keeping a fast pace going was the harder part.

A pretty quick transition, not sure of the exact time, dumped the bike gear grabbed a hat and some jelly snakes to get me round the course and headed off.

Started out ok, but quickly ran out of steam, cramped up quite badly on a couple of occassions and the second laps was more walk than run, managed to turn my ankle at some point so hobbled back to run across the finish line.

Not sure what to do differently, I hadn't done much off-road recently but coming off a long season hadn't helped.

Grabbed some water and replace followed by some food and a massage.


Being sicks for 3 weeks a couple of weeks ago interupted some of the peak training phases for this race and losing some of the motiviation over the last couple of months didn't help.


Overall was pretty happy with the race, took 1hr 15minutes off last years time, probably won't race it again next year, 3 years in a row has been enought for now.