Winding-Down

Here's a low-res montage of me screaming around the streets of S'pore last weekend. It's pretty rare to get photos of me on the bike so I'm pretty pleased. I might even choose to pay for one of them from triathlon-photos.com. My aero position looks quite good but I reckon I could go lower at the front for shorter races.

I think my race report didn't actually state that it was a great race. Expensive, but great, despite some organisational hiccups. I thoroughly recommend it to all for next year (7 September 2008) - so get saving for the entry fee. If I happen to be living there at the time you can stay at my place!

As usual I enjoyed the bike ride the best. Apart from going up and down the Ben Sheares bridge, the route was as flat as you could imagine. My new bike is most enjoyable to ride on flat straight roads so that was good. However there were about 7 sharp bends on each lap and they were quite good fun to speed round, especially the wet one coming off a downhill section!

To compare this race with one of Uncle Chans (that most of my blog readers are familiar with) I'd say that U. Chan's races are like a family meal at Granny's house with lovely home-made food and the 70.3 race is more like a meal in a 5-star hotel. Equally enjoyable, but a whole different experience.

That was my main event of the year, and with Ramadan starting next weekend, I'm winding-down my training routine for a while. I've got a short 10k run race tomorrow, Powerman in November and Phuket Triathlon in December. Apart from that I might start looking into getting into a proper off-season training schedule for some faster performances next year. That'll probably involve alternating 21km runs or long bike rides on Sunday mornings through "winter".

I'm pretty sure I'll do the 2008 KL Marathon too - the full one, not half. Mind you I still have little desire to do a full Ironman triathlon (sorry to Arif, Edwin etc...). I think it's because for me it would be a pure endurance effort and that puts me off. I'm sure I could finish it within the time limit but I'd rather stick to shorter distances and actually try to improve my times.