Western Sydney Ironman 70.3

Nicholas Hull
Dec 2, 2015
4 min read

It's been a long time since I last visited Penrith and in fact the last time I was there was as a spectator to watch Ryan Fisher race in the Youth Olympics back in 2009. Things were a bit different this time around, with an Ironman 70.3 the key event for the weekend and with just 48 hours in Sydney there was plenty crammed in to the weekend. I travelled to Sydney on the Friday afternoon with a group of athletes I coach and train with; Robbie, Luke, Luke, Morgan and Stacey and I couldn't have asked for a better group of people to spend the next 48 hours with.

The lead up to the race was nothing out of the ordinary and being just three weeks since I last raced at Challenge Forster I was unsure how my recovery would go but I seemed to pull up a lot better than expected. I even managed to squeeze in some really good training between the two events. I've got my pre-race routine well and truly sorted for these events now and after travelling to Penrith on Friday, spinning the legs out on the bike and rolling the arms over in the water on the Saturday I felt ready to race for the 6:00am Sunday morning start time.

It was a stacked pro field with a lot of quality athletes fighting it out for the victory and I was confident that if I had the race I know I'm capable of I could be one of those athletes. The swim was in the regatta centre so there was never going to be navigation issues and as the gun went off I set about getting a quick start and finding some feet near the front of the field. I found myself having to work really hard during different stages of the swim to keep in contact with the pack and had to really fight to hold on to those feet because I knew if I let the pack go it would be a very lonely day. As I exited the water I was in good company with the likes of Matt Pellow, Tim Berkel, Mark Bowstead and Dave Mainwaring but I struggled trying to get my Xterra Speedsuit off and my sleeved trisuit on and watched in desperation as they started the bike just ahead of me.

I spent the first 20 minutes of the cycle riding at my absolute limit pushing a lot harder than I normally would but similar to the swim I knew if I let these guys get away any chance of a top result was going out the window. Thankfully I did manage to catch back up and was able to settle my heart rate back down and try to get into a more manageable rhythm for the remainder of the 90km ride. Navigating our way through the first lap of the course was a bit tricky with the early rain. The U-turns gave us our first look at how much ground we had let go to Jake Montgomery and Casey Munro. Jake's quickly making a name for himself as someone who tackles every race head on with an incredible swim/ bike combination so I knew he would be the one lighting up the head of the field and we would all be attempting to try and chase. Even though the roads were drying up, the second lap was a lot more difficult because the course was filled with age group athletes and combined with some very rough and bumpy road surfaces at times made for a somewhat dangerous second lap. The 02:07:01 bike split and 42.5km/hr average speed is by far the quickest time I have ever ridden in a half-ironman event and as I dismounted with the chase pack of about eight athletes we had a time gap of just under 4 minutes to Jake and Casey.

I took off quickly at the beginning of the run to try and clear away from the other guys and settle into a pace alongside some of the top runners. For the first 3km this plan worked well and it was only Dave Mainwaring who we had to watch take off at a blistering pace but it was soon after this that I started to suffer. The run course for this race is the kind of course that is really good when you're running well but also really bad when you're not going so well because you can see the entire course and all the other guys from where you are. The rest of my run was nowhere near the 1:16-1:18 half marathon times I have produced at Sunshine Coast and Forster and in all honesty I was a bit disappointed to cross the line in 9th place in 03:59:51 and a run split of 1:24.

If I had run to my potential I could have been a lot higher up the leaderboard but Western Sydney just wasn't to be my running day. I put together a much better swim and bike combination to put myself in a position to be able to win the race so even though I was a little disappointed with this result I look at it as a big step in the right direction because rather than running to make up lost ground from the swim and bike I was entertaining thoughts of how to attack the run to be at the pointy end of the field. Congratulations to Dave Mainwaring, Jake Montgomery and Nick Kastelein who did attack the race and finished on the podium.

It isn't long now before I have one final crack for 2015 down at Ballarat Ironman 70.3 on December 13th where I'll be looking to finish the year on a high and after a very busy schedule over the past couple of months I'll also be keen to enjoy a bit of down time once this race is over before setting my sights on what's to come in 2016 :)