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CHALLENGE WANAKA 5. PLATZ JANUAR 2010

Challenge Wanaka 2010... What a beautiful day :)

I am back in the office after one fantastic week in down South. Victoria and Felix and everyone else involved have put on another brilliant Challenge Wanaka race. I felt slightly exhausted going down to Wanaka being busy with trying to finish some final work reports and accidentaly selling my bed and ending up sleeping on the floor and then progressing to an airbed (that loses air over night) in the last week before the race. Anyway. I was feeling good going down to Wanaka.

The water temperature was about 14 degrees. It was actually not as cold as I thought it would be. It took about 40km on the bike though until I could feel my feet again ;) My swim was slow as usual. Maybe due to a bit of back pain from not sleeping in a proper bed. However, the bike felt fantastic and with 5:27h I could manage the third fastest bike split (females) that day. Yippiiieh :)

The first 21 kilometers on the run felt pretty good too. I had caught Jodie Scott from Australia on the last 2km of the 180km bike and she left T2 about 20 seconds ahead of me. Jodie and I were running together for about the first 13 kilometers. During these kilometer she had to stop and strech out her back several times. Abyway atfer struggling up Gun road she must have had a kick-a** song on her Ipod because all of a sudden she was "sprinting" past me and stayed about 20 meters ahead of me for the rest of the first lap of the run.not even try to catch her again because all I wanted was to stay under 10:15 to hopefully get some prizemoney. So I diodn't want to risk blowing myself up!! And I felt really comfortable with the pace I was doing. Approaching kilometer 22 my legs unfortunately just died. It happened quit quickly but I really hit the wall and the last 20 kilometers were a whole world of pain. It felt like I had some kind of vaccuum in my legs and all the tissues were sticking together. Luckely my head was in a really good space this time and this made it almost "easy" to push through the pain.

Overall I am stoked with coming 5th in 10:25h which is a course PB by 7 minutes. Not happy about that second run lap of course. Its something I obviously really need to work on. As well as on my swim. Next race on the list is the Auckand Halfironman on March 20th.

So you'll hear from me again soon :) Celia