When I first arrived here on the Gold Coast, I was a bit sceptical about it being triathlon paradise as the roads were so busy, cycling just seemed so dangerous. However since I've started training here with the local tri club South Port, I've found that it really is a great place to train. Last week I notched up 25hrs on training in my first week here, all of it in glorious sunshine.
Swimming with the South Port guy's has been great fun, the ausies really know how to swim, no wonder though when they have the facilities. We are training at The Southport School which has a 12 lane 50meter out door pool and a 25meter pool. These guy's are so lucky they get all 12 lanes for the 50 strong swimmers coming along to the sessions. Beats our 3lanes at the commie that's for sure. So far all the sessions I have done have been between 3.5 and 4.2k in length and I have never used my fins and paddles as much as I have here. ERC guy's watch out as when I get back I will be bringing a lot of the swim sets from here back with me, so get those fins and paddles out and dust them off.
One think which I thought I would struggle with out here was the early morning training, however it's been easier than I thought. If I'm training on my own then I'm up at 6am and out for 7 to bike or run. If i'm training with the tri guy's I'm up at 4am and out for 5 to meet up with them for a session. It's nice biking along the waterfront watching the sun rise, plus your training is over and done with so early. On Saturday past we did a 150K bike with a 45min run off the bike and were finished before 11am, perfect that meant I could spend the rest of the day reading my book in the sun and watch the Ausie rules football grand final in the afternoon. It couldn't really get any better. Yesterday I went on a long solo ride on one of the routes Emma Snowsill recommended, and it really was hilly. I thought if anything it was going to be rolling, not hilly like back home, man I was wrong. At the start of the hills there was a 14% climb for 800m, then the road went up and down for a while varying from 8-10% and finished with a 2.8k 10% climb, I'd have to say I was missing my 25 sprocket, after only bringing an 11-23 with me as the race courses I'll be competing on are going to be flat. Other than that though it was some great climbing with good descents and no traffic so you could use both sides of the road. I think I'll do that route again.
Running wise I've done several runs on my own just heading out along the water front and back, the sights are pretty nice, not only the sun rise and bikini's but I've also seen whales playing out in the water when I was running one morning, that was pretty cool. On Sunday when I was out with the group the TV crews were on the beach filming something. We thought it might have been a whales as one of the guy's thought he saw one surfacing, then again it was a hot day so we weren't sure if he has just dehydrated. However when I got home I heard on the news a whale had been trapped in the shark nets just off the beach where we were running, but thankfully it got away safely. I've been running well while I've been out here with some good track sessions and a good hard interval sessions on the road on Monday morning at 5am after a long hard weekend, so I'm really looking forward to Perth as training is going well. But before Perth I have a local race this Sunday at Colypso Bay, it's a bit of a strange distance, 1k swim, 33k bike and 7k run but I'm looking forward to it to see how I'm going. Plus a lot of the guy's from the club are going up to the race as there is also a half Ironman on at the same time so it should be a good day's racing. After the race I'm going to head down to Sydney for a few days to do some sightseeing, do the bridge walk, visit the zoo, have some good food so hopefully that will be a nice wee break after a good hard race.
I'll let you know how the race goes next week.
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