This was my second year in a row coming to Mooloolaba for this race. I am generally not a fan of this distance (1.5/40/10) just because I suck at it, but I love the town of Mooloolaba and everything about this course and really hope I can continue to come back to this race!
It definitely wasn’t the Sunshine Coast over the weekend, it was constantly raining and very windy, race day was no different.
I was racing in the Open/elite wave alongside some of the best triathletes in Australia and the world. Our race started at 6.35am, the Swim was pretty calm waters but i found the entire Swim really hard! I had no rhythm or feel for the water. I was swimming along side Pro triathlete Ryan waddington, it was like de ja vu from 12months ago but this year I didn’t feel comfortable at all I was swimming like my whole race dependend on it. We were out of the water just over 2mins down on the leaders.
out onto the bike I was in a group of 3 athletes. It is a pretty straight forward course in Mooloolaba it’s 20km straight along the free way and 20km straight back. This year we had a massive tail wind on the way out averaging speeds well over 50km/h and once we turned around it was straight into a head wind struggling to hold our bikes up right! I was going through good and bad patches on the bike, riding with two really strong athletes tested my legs and I was happy to hold onto the group for the whole 40km.
I was happy to see the end of the bike and head out onto the run, it’s quite a hard run course with a pretty decent size hill that we have to go over 3 times and with the wind thrown into that it made it a tough end to the day. I was hurting as much as possible on the run but I’m just lacking the top end speed I need at the moment to compete against the top guys. I Was pretty happy to make my way over the hill for the last time and get across the finish line after a hard 2.01.05 of racing finishing 10th Open male.
As hard as it was I loved this race and although it wasnt perfect there was improvment on last year and has put me in a good place leading into Challange Melbourne at the end of April which I cannot wait for!
As always I want to say a massive thank you to my sponsors Peak Fitness Huskisson, Raine and Horne Huskisson, Innovate air and electrical, Gray and Julie Parkes, Just Go driving school, Elite Energy, ASPORT cycling, Wildginger and Fusion multi sport.
Thank you to my coach Nathan Miller for all the hard work and my mum, Dad and partner Kelly for all the love and support.
Thanks for reading.