I had never done the POT Half as an individual before, but the change of date to later in January suited me well (it gave me a couple more weeks to burn off the Christmas/NY beers and food!),
and meant I was eager to get up to The Mount and kick off my 2018 season.

I had a good training spell in Wanaka before heading north to Tauranga and so knew the fitness was there, I just wasn’t sure of where the form was.

I had started a new training regime i.e. ‘keep swimming to a minimum’ so was surprised to find myself at the front of the swim after a few hundred meters and happy to lead out of the water, but with 3 others in tow.

I figured my toughest competition would come from Mike Phillips, who I train almost everyday with in Christchurch, and Cam Brown, and was happy to see that neither of them were with us on to the bike. My race plan was to watch Mike and respond to his moves, so it was a bonus for me that he had to use some fire power early on the bike to catch our group up. He caught us around the 30km mark and I sensed that the effort had taken a bit out of him. Browny was a few minutes back at this stage and I was keen to keep it at that, and the 4 of us still at the front set a steady tempo with no real fireworks throughout the rest of the ride.

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By the time we hit the final stretch of the ride it was only Mike, myself, and Matt Franklin who unluckily punctured in the last few Km’s, so it came down to just Mike and I off the bike together. I managed to have a great transition and  put 10-15 seconds on Mike, which meant he had to chase again. After watching Mike destroy us at Taupo 70.3 just 6 weeks earlier I was simply waiting for him to make the move and hoped that I would be able to respond. I got the odd inclination that it might have been my day and not Mikes, but this is triathlon, and bluffing is all part of the fun! We ran the first lap together and we both seemed pretty comfortable. Browny was far enough behind for us to allow tactics to come in to it a little, but we still had to keep the tempo up.
At about the 14km mark I finally decided to just have a crack and see where Mike was at…

I wasn’t too surprised when he let me go without much of a fight. More and more I got the feeling he was struggling, and with a decent time gap to Browny there was no point in risking 2nd place on the day and really digging deep early in the season.
It was a great feeling to be able to run around The Mount knowing I would finally win another race in NZ after a few years off the top step… and my second half-distance victory – who would have thought!
A great way to start the year and a great feeling to know all is heading in the right direction for Challenge Wanaka and IMNZ in 4&6 weeks time.
Until then,
cheers!

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