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Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley

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Thu, 19 Mar 2009

Jindabyne Multisport Classic 2009 - 17:28
Last year I wrote one of my longish and reasonably detailed reports about this race. This year I managed to finish the event solo, however do not feel like writing too much about it. As always the Jindabyne Multisport Classic (they called it a classic, even the first year they ran it...) is a fantastic event. After being pulled out of the water more than 11 hours in during the final swim unable to breathe and cramping up last year I really wanted to finish.

Fortunately I did, though I did not speed up much on last year. I felt fantastic for the first 6 or 7 hours of this race, then sometime during the long run up to sawpit I no longer felt I had enough left in the tank to go hard. I had been hoping that pacing myself I might finally feel I could start putting some effort in at this point, however I was unable to get my HR over 130 for the rest of the race and pretty much crawled all the way to the finish.

Once again my worst leg was definitely swimming, compared with good swimmers in the solo field, such as Alex, I lost almost an hour. Looking at times for excellent swimmers such as Shanyn I lost more, however I can not imagine I will ever swim as well as she does, and I was racing solo anyway. My current plan, rather than stopping swimming again until I start getting ready for this event again next year is to continue to go to at least one coached squad session every week.

On a seeming tangent now, I notice in my GPS/HR training data that since I bought the Garmin in August 2007 I have the distances of all sessions I have done (riding, running, paddling) listed to inspect and view the maps and data from. In that time I have only done a session in which I travelled more than 100KM on 6 occasions. This is pretty pathetic when you consider how easy it is for me to do a road ride over 100 KM. Two of these sessions were the Hawkesbury classic paddle race in 2007 and the Jindabyne race I just finished on Sunday. So I think we can see when compared to how I used to do long road rides at least once a week, generally a longish mountain bike ride every fortnight or so my riding is definitely down on what it once was. Sure I kayak and run now days but none of them tend to be longer than 2 hours very often.

Getting back to the race I think my body just was not ready for more than 6 hours non stop and was not working as well as it could after that time. Also the multi discipline nature of the event was something I had not prepared for well in the lead up. For next year I will definitely need to do more long stuff and make sure I am feeling more ready for such a long stretch out there at intensity.

I must thank my support crew, Kerry, for her help all day. She did a spectacular job and was organised all day and got kept me going despite never having done support like this before, also thanks to Ron for helping her out most of the day. Without their help and some generous help from many others I would not be able to do the event solo.

I did do more swim training before the race this year and I think it showed as I was able to get out of the swims reasonably fresh feeling and was not even the slowest solo competitor in them all. The long ride though I was once more crawling through it, really is spectacular and I recommend it to any mountain bikers who like epic feeling bike legs and big hills and alpine country. The long run is also though a really lovely walking track and when not suffering worth admiring.

Race coverage wise, I have a few photos on my camera but am being a bit lazy to upload them. Sri Chinmoy's gallery page for the event has a fair few (those with me in them are finishing the second bike, transitioning to long run, start of first run, background behind Libby running, start of fun (techy) bike leg, running through Thredbo river picnic area, first swim start with Julie and Alex and getting out of a swim.

There are good shots there of Alex (who won solo mens) and Julie (won solo womens) and a lot of my other friends up there racing. Also there was a professional photographer up there, Greg Long and his event photos are pretty good.

Anyway I enjoyed the event and have a definite interest in trying to do better next year, a spectacular (and hard) day out. I still think more people should enter, it is more fun than Triple Tri, shorter legs, better scenery, something different (though triple tri is itself a lot of fun). Also more solos would be cool (lets hope Zoe, Danielle, Libby and others may be keen to enter next year so it is not just Julie in womens).

[/mtb/events] link


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