ticket to Kona<\/a> was already locked in as well as having Peter Robertson, aka Robbo, heading there. <\/p>\nSomething that worked for me was the fact that we stayed a fair distance away from the course which ensured we’d get some decent work in without all the hype and noise you sometimes get from big races. On a lighter note, lets just say the autobahn is quick. Having a change of scenery was also really enjoyable.<\/p>\n
Going into the race I had a fair idea of who was going to be the top performers on the day, including, Robbo and Bart. <\/p>\n
The swim start was a little different than usual as it had two swim sections, or loop, which you had to leave the water and then re-enter again. I felt that my swim was fairly good and exited with the main group. The first, of two laps, I was sitting on the back and hoping to not be dropped. Once we exited onto the second lap, I felt that things started to settle down a little and I slowly made my way to the front of the main group. I exited the swim in 8th place in 22:47.<\/p>\n
Heading out on the bike and within the first 10km I watched a few guys fly past me. The course was fairly demanding with fairly big climbs and fast descents – which one athlete ahead of me had crashed in front of me and I nearly become the second casualty. I entered T2 in 6th place with a time of 2:28:42 and average speed of 36.31km\/h.<\/p>\n
I was heading out of T2 with Robbo and we were both swamped with guys running past us. I was now feeling a little sluggish and in the back of my mind I thought “this is game on.” To give you an idea, the run was very up and down dirt track, kind of something that you’d find in a park which I found really enjoyable. I completed the run in 1:14:57 with an average in 3:33\/km.<\/p>\n
Overall I’m really happy to have finished in the top 5 in 4:10:07.<\/p>\n
I’m now heading back to Boulder, Colorado, with next stop is the 70.3 World Championship in Canada.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":948,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946"}],"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=946"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1096,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions\/1096"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timberkel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}