IRONING MAN

The couple of weeks after Canberra were, as you can imagine, very mellow. I’ve never felt so beaten up in an event so I figured my body would take a bit of time to recover. Plus it was almost Christmas and I’d had a long hard year of events so I owed myself a break. I took it easy for the next week and a half leading up until Christmas, had a fantastic longish easy ride on the Sunday just before Chrissy with a whole bunch of the guys I’d spent most of the year riding with. Nobody was training for anything or had any goals for the session and it was really nice to just cruise around the national park riding easy and chatting.

I did a little bit of running on Christmas morning, some mile repeats up at North Sydney oval to get the heart started. Then Boxing Day was the big IRONINGMAN event!

Dan had organised a few social races in the UK and this was his first crack as race director in Australia. He did a great job, organising a mini triathlon down at Balmoral beach on a clear sunny morning. It was just the three competitors, Dan, Andrew and myself (Mark was sidelined with the flu) and we did a swim at the beach, a very hilly ride up to Chowder Bay, a couple of laps of that road and then back, and a run down around the Bathers Pavilion, back up around the oval to the finish.

Transition was a big shady tree with an ironing board set up next to it, holding champers and OJ for the support crew and we all stayed together through the race – it was really really fun and a big thanks to Dan for organising it. Next year it’ll be HUGE!