World 70.3 Triathlon Championships!

2009 Clearwater 70.3 Race Report

This past Sunday I raced at the 70.3 World Triathlon Championships in Clearwater, Florida. It has been a long, fun season and I was looking forward to one last hard effort in 2009. Coming off a great race two weeks ago in Austin, Texas I felt pretty confident that I was ready to go.

At the end of the day, I feel as though I came up a bit short finishing overall in 37^th with a time of 3:47:55. Taking the week to evaluate things I realize that it was a solid race, with a very big field of 85 pro men.

I realized early on in the race that the swim was going to dictate my position going into the run. Leading into the race my swimming was very strong; to analyze my swim in Clearwater I would have to say it was a poor performance. I knew I had the speed however; I spent the first 800m battling with other swimmers for position. Eventually I decided just to back off and swim because I was expending too much energy. I ended up exiting 45second’s back from the leaders. Mistake number one of the day was relaxing and ending up in a second group.

I rode relatively smart trying not to get any penalties which was very tough with a big field on narrow flat roads. The chase pack that eventually formed was huge, there had to be 40 of us. I felt like for 2 hours I was often slowing down trying to not to get a penalty. I was in a chase pack but we were still riding very fast, it contained a lot of good athletes from different countries that have been top 10 here in the past or that have won 70.3 races this year. The pack had the likes of James Cotter, Richie Cunningham, James Hadley, Jeff Symonds, Renaldo Colluci and half way through the bike Oscar Galindaz and Chris Legh entered the group. Overall, the bike went well except I lost a bottle from the back of my bike and I dropped another at the last bottle drop forcing me to survive on one bottle. At the end of the bike I had started to get a headache and the temperature started to rise.

After a slow transition due to a lost bag I started to get in my rhythm. The run course was 2 loops which means I got to see spectators frequently which brought positive energy when I needed it most. I ended up running 1:17 and change for the half marathon putting me in 37^th place. With such a quick field there were easily 10 spots in front of me within 1 minute and another 10 spots right behind me. It was great to hear Alicia Kaye and all of the friends and coach’s I had watching and cheering. I gave it what I had on the day, but if I had swam 30 seconds faster the race could have been different.

A perfect summary of my 2009 season is illustrated in this Andre Agassi quote that I came across while reading his biography Open. To give a little context to this quote, Andre said this after losing the US Open when he was 15 years old. I still think he made $90 000 that year and bought himself a new Corvette. “Looking back it was good but not great. I see a gap between where I am and where I need to be, and I feel reasonably confident that I can close that gap.”

I would like to thank Dan Smith, Colonels Bikes, LifeSport, K-Swiss, AquaSphere, Path to Wellness, Frank@ PowerBar Canada, Ridglea Swimming and of course Carley and my parents for all of their support this season. I am super excited for 2010, however now its time to rest. I would like to congratulate all who raced on Saturday and to wish everyone a safe and healthy off-season.

Thanks for reading,

Brent