O’Neill too fast and furious at North Coast Enduro

With a five weeks to go before the National Duathlon Championships in Melbourne I commenced my race specific training with the fourth round of the North Coast Duathlon Series on June 16th. The race was extremely technical and very short distances which enabled me to work on practising transitions, u-turns (there will be 6 per lap, with 6 laps for the 40km bike at nationals- 36 in total!) and general bike handling skills. The race distances were 1.6km Run (3 u-turns) 4.7km bike (6 laps on a hot dog circuit ie 11 u- turns) /1.2km run (2 u-turns) /4.7km bike (another 11!/2.2km run (5 u-turns). I had invited Sean O’Neill along to the race in an attempt to get some practice riding a tight course with someone around - the likely scenario for Nationals race.

The race was a blur of twists and turns, transitions and lactate. Together after the first run, Shaun managed to steal a few seconds at the end of the first lap on the bike as I tried to get my feet into the shoes. From there he showed superior technical skills (cornering, transitions in particular) to open up a small lead going into the second run leg. He repeated the dose on the second bike leg as I muffed up the second run/bike transition and he had about 150m going into the final run- I found some very strong rhythm in the last km of the final run but could only close to within 40m at the finish. These races are fantastic for fine tuning technical skills and fit well into winter training for triathletes wishing to improve such aspects of racing. The North Coast Tri Club organised the race brilliantly and had plenty of spot prizes to pass around at the finish. The final race is on July 30th and will be a more traditional 1.6km/10km/3.2km format, check there website www.northcoasttriclub.org.au for results and entry forms for the final race. Well done to Shaun on a great race- he was very impressive today.

On a training note, the 5 week base phase of training went very well with 1500km of bike and 350km of running in the legs since returning from the USA. The first Wednesday of July we celebrated the 1 year anniversary of “The Gentleman’s Ride” which is our weekly ride up through Munduring and Kalamunda of about 90km. The session started with WA Ironman and Half Ironman champion Steve Bishop and myself and has grown to a great group with the evergreen Sandy Burt and emerging 17 year old cyclist Ben King being the most consistent additions. King in particular is getting super strong and has even taken to riding with 10kg on his back as a handicap for the rest of us!- the kid has the potential for big things if he can continue to handle such large volumes of training (1000km/week) without any apparent fatigue.

Finally, my current world rankings with the ITU is 25th as at 15/06/06
www.triathlon.org/docs/rankings-duathlon-men.pdf although I will receive some points from the Asian Championships which were not previously allocated. My ranking will drop after the World Championships in Corner Brook (where I will not be racing due to high costs) but I am trying to find some sponsorship to get to Europe in October for the European Championships in Rimini, Italy and the final World Cup in London. In the Powerman Long Distance world rankings www.powerman.org my inaugural ranking is 30th after Powerman Ohio but I expect this to improve significantly after Powerman Malaysia in November. If anyone is keen to discuss sponsorship give me an email and we can chat!

Keep du-ing it,
Radar