Japan 70.3

Hey Guys,

So Japan 70.3 has been run and won and unfortunately for me my race just didn`t go to plan. I woke up feeling good, a little nervous but good none the less. On arrival to transition the announcement was made that the water temp was 24.5 degrees only just cold enough for it to be a wetsuit swim which in my opinion and many others is way to hot!
I went out conservatively in the beginning of the swim because I have a history of really struggling in wetsuit swims in warm water, today was no different but I just did what I could to make the end of the swim without killing myself. By the end of the swim I was absolutely cooking but managed to get out in 5th place and to my surprise just in front of Cameron Brown.
The first 8\10km was very technical on narrow bumpy/cracked paths and was rather slow, by the end of this portion of the course I had managed to loose both my bottles of water and was only left with my sports drink and gels. In most events this normally would not be to much of an issue because most 70.3`s have aid stations on the bike roughly every 10mile and have ample bottles of water, sports drink,Gels etc. this bike course only had one drink station you passed twice(40kand 70k) and it only had screw top bottles of water which as it turns out were not necessarily for the athletes.
So between 10\15km Cam and I caught 2 riders Balazs Csoke and I`m not sure of the other guy, now that there was only one athlete just up the road and I had no water my plan was to get to the aid station and grab a couple of bottles at 40km. Skip a few kilometres and I'm about 100m away from the aid station and Cam was about 50m ahead of me and I could see the leader up ahead of Cam and the two guys we picked up early on had dropped off. Finally I was about to get some water or so I thought!
The aid station went a little something like this, I asked for water and pointed to the big pallet of water bottles, they point to the small cups on the tables. I ask for more water bottles desperately for obvious reasons because I am in a race for money!!! Then some of the people behind the aid station begin to laugh at me, I continue to yell give me the "Flipping" water bottles repeatedly. At this point I was looking for anything and I saw the bottles of the people working the aid station but the were half full at best and I needed lots more water then that so I threw the half full bottle at the pallet of bottles and demanded water bottles at which point the aid station king pin grabbed my bike. after more yelling I finally got 2 bottles of water got back out onto the bike course and any advantage I had from the first 40km of the bike was gone. Once back on the course I was a little bit angry but I put it behind me because I had a job to do, I rode the remainder of the bike with Balazs Csoke but by the 60km make I could feel I wasn`t riding quite as well as I was at the beginning of the bike. As we approached the aid station for the second time I was prepared and because they were busy supplying water to many age groupers for their tea party, I just grabbed a bottle and kept on going.　Not a lot happened for the remainder of the bike, except I think I lost a lot of time. I was trying to remain as optimistic as possible but when I got off the bike and heard the the group behind was actually right behind us I was a bit disappointed. After T2 I headed out onto the run in 3rd but my stomach was feeling a little bit sketchy, I persevered for as long as I could but at 2km my stomach was like one big cramp. I`m sad to say that the next 10km were slow and painful, from about 12km I started to feel a little more comfortable then early on and I managed to run a bit better. Not good, Just better. I ended up finishing 11th a long way back...
In the end it was a disappointing result, I felt good going into the race and this race is deffinatly no indication of where my current form is at. It was just one of those days where a combination of tough conditions and a bit of bad luck made for a disastrous day!

The race a side Japan 70.3 has deffinatly been a unique experience, I can`t think on many airports around the world where you could run a triathlon.

Anyway I arrive home midday Wednesday, and my next event will be Gold Coast Half Ironman where I am expecting there to be a really tough field.



Until next time!



Gav