Posts tagged Clayton Fettell

I came into this race with a long build up where all my life existed of was training, eating & sleeping in my Hypoxico Altitude Tent. I know from past experiences that altitude training works well for me special on my run form, so it was a simple choice to spend the 8 weeks prep sleeping in the tent.

With Ironman Melbourne being a championship race it was always going to bring some of the best athletes in the world, so for me it was a good test to see where I’m standing. It is well known that not everyone is at 100% because it is at the start of the year & I was one of them.

The last few days before the race I was not as nervous as I normally am, maybe because I could sleep in my own bed & I did not have to go and eat out.

There was a bit of panic at the end of the week when I got a bit stiff in my lower back. I was lucky to get into a see a physio on Saturday morning & he did save my race for sure.

With Melbourne weather it does change a fair bit, it is known for having 4 seasons in a day. I was prepared for anything and on Saturday at race briefing the organisation advised us the swim had been changed to a two lap swim & did also have a backup plan if the winds didn’t drop that we would still have a swim but a shortened one. All athletes were aware this could be a possibility, but that is racing.

I did a test swim Saturday afternoon to get an idea of how bad it was which went ok but was definately rough. Waking up race day to howling winds I was sure we’d have have a shortened swim and just after my warm up we got told that the swim was cut down to 1.9km. & a delayed start. I took my chance to a small nap!!

But like Marino Vanhoenacker did say at least we did get a swim, it’s not ideal to swim 1.9 but it was the right call. I think all athletes after the race agreed on that.

I did not have the best swim start, but did stay in contact with the 2^nd group the whole swim, even though it was very rough. I came out onto the bike with the group, but as soon as Cameron Brown, Joe Gambles & Marino hit the front, the group started splitting up. Thanks to the massive headwind I was only doing 30-35km/h, but quickly found my own pace; With a two lap course there would still be 45km into headwind on second lap as well so didn’t want to be on empty for that. We did have a good tailwind back which was a great relief and I was able to sit on 47-58km/h the way back into Frankston.

At the start of the second lap quite a few athletes start dropping out because they had gone out too hard out, so I just tried to limit my loss to the front and prepare for a big run.

When I hit the run I was in 17^th place, well down on where I had hoped for, but with 42.2km’s in side/headwind I knew a lot could happen and the weaker runners would be found out. Leon Griffin & I did work well together on the start of the run and were sitting on 3:50-4:00 pace, so it was just a matter of time before we would start to catch athletes up in front. It did go well until 20km mark where we came up to Jeremy Jurkiewicz, I tried to drop Jeremy, but ending up dropping Leon & 1km later when we hit a small hill I dropped Jeremy. I could see Petr Vabrousek 1min ahead so I used a few km’s to get up to him, and at the 24km mark I caught him and we started working together. We got splits that there was group around 4-6min ahead of us. More >