Originally Samoa was not on my race calendar however Guy Beasley convinced me to head over and try out this new race. Samoa was a destination I had not been to before. It wasn’t a long trip so figured I’d give it a go. Samoa was some what an eye opener for me. The Samoan people were lovely, there food was really tasty and I loved drinking there fresh
\ncoconuts. <\/p>\n
The temperature on race day was hot and it was a non wetsuit swim. I had an ok swim then onto the bike where my day ended. I had a flat and I was one of the many casualties during the day. I was able to fix the first flat with a pit stop but after it blew completely so that my day over. I was in second place and was lucky enough to receive a police car escort back into town. To make the trip not a complete waste of time I decided to do the run.<\/p>\n
Overall my experience was great and I thoroughly enjoyed the race and the people. But all in all I would recommend this race. PS: I highly recommend taking your training wheels with some seriously good tyres on them. I think my Giant cross bike would have even been more appropriate. I want to thank Seti and Emily for making me feel so welcome in there country.<\/p>\n
The following week I headed up to Yeppoon which is based in central Queensland, Australia. Race morning was lovely and Yeppoon really turned on the weather. My swim wasn’t too bad coming out in the tail end of the first pack. Onto the bike I set out on my merry way chasing down the boys. I caught the them and moved into 3rd place only having to catch Casey Munro which I did and of course Tim Reed was up the road. <\/p>\n
I was then riding on my lonesome on the third lap and this is where the controversy started. A Technical Official (TO) rode up to me and gave me a blocking penalty. I questioned this by asking “WHO”, as there was only a bunch of age groupers near me, riding 2-3 abreast on a narrow course. I thoughtfully moved to the middle of the road to pass them (common sense) which obviously was what he was trying to pull me up on. <\/p>\n
I got off the bike some 3 and a half minutes behind Tim Reed. I served what felt the longest 5 minutes of my life which of course caused my legs to seize up. I slowly watched my place get eaten up, dropping me back to 8th spot before I was able to going again. <\/p>\n
The boys took off quickly with Mitch Robbins pulling up the road at a very fast pace which I knew I would have my work cut out for me in order to catch them. I slowly started to tow the boys all in and I managed to get my second spot back again around the 8km mark.<\/p>\n
I ended my day with a disappointing 2nd place, 4 minutes behind Tim Reed. I take my hat off to him, and credit where credit is due, he ran a professional race and well done on back to back victories. <\/p>\n
So back to my questionable penalty of 5 minutes. I feel that the TO could have observed the situation and responded more accurately. Anyway what’s done is done and I’m now back training and looking forward to competing at Metaman in two weeks.<\/p>\n
Thanks again to my amazing team; Wife & fur babies, Scody, Giant, Newton, Daikin, Endura, Shimano, Oakley, Garmin, Blue Seventy, Altitude training systems, Continental Tyres, Scicon and my coach Grant Giles<\/p>\n
Cheers Berks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,11,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}