Ironman New Zealand

Race Report

I would like to thank everyone for all the support you have given me on social media during and after the race. It's awesome to see after the race and it brings a smile to my face re-living the highs and lows of the race again!

For me it was such a relief more then anything to have luck on my side after the bad luck I had at Wanaka. During the race I rode pretty much the whole bike by myself. Dougal Allan caught me with 35Ks to go and I said to him lets work together and he was up for it. He did the first turn which helped me to recover a lot and then when I did my turn I accidentally went w bit to hard and dropped him. I kept at my own pace again after this and he caught me with .5 Mike to go. That was probably the only tactical mistake I did really during the race as had I gone I bit slower when I was on the front we would have both been able to work together and would have rode faster for less effort.

When I got into transition I had no idea the guys ahead were so close as there was no one in the tent with me at that time so I was really surprised to see all the others at the start of the run and to see that I was so close to them.

I decided to just ran my own pace on the run and hold back at the start, I kept telling myself in my head that the others in front would crack and when they did I would be waiting ready to pounce. While I was working my way through the field I could also see Matt Hanson was coming up through the filed at the same time. I know he's a quality runner and I knew that he would be starting off fast to try and get in the race. Starting the last lap I could see he was around 3 minutes behind and thought that he had been catching around 2 minutes a lap on me. I knew if I could hold pace I could hold him off although I have to admit it did scare me into going balls to the wall as I didn't want to end up off the podium.

Back to the guys in front and one by one they started to fade and I was able to catch them. I moved into 3rd with about 10 miles to go and at the start of the last lap was around 2.45 off first and second. With around 7.5 miles to go everyone was telling me that one of them had cracked and this motivated me so much to really push on and push through the pain.

I got to 20 seconds of Callum and felt like I was blowing up. There was only about 5k to go but I felt pretty empty. I knew that I had to dig deep and told myself to stop being a pussy! It sounds a funny thing to think about but I knew I would get an extra $3000 if I caught him and that was a good enough incentive as well as just wanting to hurt myself to catch him.

Once I caught him there was only 4Ks to go. I didn't dare look over my shoulder in case he gathered some more energy and came back to me. The last 4 kilometres were really tough as I was going as hard as I could to hold on.

I have to take my hat off to Cameron Brown a new course record of 8 hours 7 minutes on what is not that fast a course and to beat a quality field to take his 12th win at ironman New Zealand. An absolute inspiration who executed a floor less race!

Thanks to all my sponsors, I'm going to enjoy the last couple of days out here. I hope the doms from hell I have die down a bit before I take on the 40 hours of travelling back to the uk. Looking forward to seeing Laura and Maisie when I get back and I can't wait to start training for Roth. So excited already for that race, hopefully no other Brits will go sub 8 in the mean time! 😄