firstoffthebike.com - Races

Daniel Hoy checks in from Geelong

After a solid swim, great bike ride and good two laps of the run, deciding to do Geelong 70.3 three weeks out from race start seemed like a great idea.

Then came the third lap of the run ... and it quickly became the worst idea ever. I expect that third lap changed the day for many of the 1500 plus competitors.  In a word it was brutal.

The swim start was uneventful, except for the 100 or so competitors that crept forward 50m from the official start.  Triathletes can be dirty cheats when given the chance (more on that point later). Not being a great fan of being smacked around the head while I try to swim, I chose the soft option and kept most of the pack on my right. It as an interesting swim to say the least.

For starters, you would have expected for the almost $300 entry IMG could have afforded another couple of swim bouys. One at 800, then another 700 across was not enough.  Making them bright yellow made it easier, but having the lifeguards paddling around decked out in a very similar yellow made it much more difficult. Then when the pack rounded the first bouy the sun meant you could not see more than 20 metres, making navigation very tough.

But I manged to somehow find my way back to shore, though I reckon a couple of people may have come ashore in Williamstown.

Thanks to the boys at Race Day Rentals I was sporting a Zipp 404 Zed Tech front wheel and 808 back to help drag me around the next 90km. If you can’t afford a set of new wheels (or you want to test out prospective new kit), this is by far the easiest and best way of getting yourself a set for your big day, delivered to your door a week before the raced and then picked up after.

The first lap of the bike was uneventful and I held the pace I had planed, actually went a bit quicker.
The second lap can only be described as a joke, riders I had passed easily on the first lap were now rolling past in packs of 20-30, it was like riding on beach road on a Saturday morning. It’s a tough ask for draft busters to stop the blatent cheating that was going on, they would have needed to bust half the field.

It’s hard to avoid when the road has so many cyclists on it, but if you can’t ride at a speed without drafting then drop back from the pack, the amount of people I saw working to hang onto a pack was ridiculous. If you want to ride in a pack, chuck your running shoes in the bin and become a cyclist.  I’d hate to play cards with any of the people drafting in big packs, they’d have aces up both sleeves.
It’s pretty simple, it’s cheating, personally I’d feel guilty doing it. But if I’d ridden the bike course on my own and missed out on a Clearwater spot, I'd be seriously annoyed.

Onto the run - in a word, tough. Even on a cool day it would have been difficult as not much of it’s flat, it’s either up or down.

The highlight for me was seeing Crowie come the other way. That dude can run - he looked like he was in third gear. For me that’s one of the best aspects of our sport, you’re the same as Crowie (granted a lot slower) doing the same course, in the same conditions. Not a lot of sports can boast being having amateurs racing with pros.

A final thought: If you’ve never done Geelong, do it. It’s a tough day at the office, but it’s a cracking course.