My Eric The Eel Moment
Remember Eric The Eel from the Sydney Olympics?? Wasn’t he great?
We Aussies just love an underdog, don’t we? A battler, a struggler, a straggler?
Yeah.
Well I was all of those things on Australia Day.
You’d have lurved me!
January 26, 2010 was a special day for me. It marked the longest triathlon I have ever done. The furthest I had swam, cycled and run back-to-back. It doesn’t really sound that far … but 400m swim, 16km bike and the 4km run was a long way for me!
I had two goals: to finish and to finish in a time of 1hr 25mins or less.
Tick and tick! Achieved. How proud am I?
I finished in 72nd place. That’s stone cold, stinking, dead last - by a loooong way.
The man at the run turn actually picked up the witch’s hat and ran with me for about half a kilometre after I had turned at 2km. He then got picked up in a car. I wanted a car. A course marshal on a mountain bike rode with me, egging me on and allowing me to “draft” behind him!
I wasn’t alone!
The winner, Jonathon Hitchens, recorded splits of 6:18mins (400m swim); 24:06mins (16km bike); 13:11mins (4km run) to finish in a time of 43.35mins!
Here are my results … it’s quite amusing.
It’s alright really, there’s no need to feel sorry for me!
The upside to that sad state of affairs is I can’t get much slower. It’s all up from here!
x
