Sharon did the mountain bike leg in a team for the 2015 IceBreaker Challenge. During supporting her on that event I decided that I was going to have a crack at this event and my multi-sport ambitions hatched and evolved from that day. My plan was to spend the next 12 months paddling, running and mountain biking for this event. As it turned out Sharon and I did the one day section of Freycinet Challenge before this event came around as a mixed team.

I have to admit I stopped running for most of December and all of January and I only did just enough on the running side to get through as I hate running and I have retired from running once again for the foreseeable future if not permanently post event.

Drone footage of the paddle start. I’m the all red boat mid pack in the middle.

I had a cracking paddle with by best ever 10km time with quite a few faster boats behind me. I was really pleased with my paddle as my race plan was to not go to hard but felt really good and went at max effort for almost whole time. Once you finish the paddle you have to run up from the dam edge to the transition area on top of the hill, 350M of torture at an average grade of 10% gets your attention quickly after paddling for close to an hour. I passed a whole heap of people going up the hill after the paddle.

Avoiding a collision at the second turn. Looks quite sedate in the video but I can assure you my heart rate was around threshold for the whole paddle.

Sharon was in transition to help me with a speedy change over to the mountain bike and I was out of there and peddling in under 2 minutes. The race has a separate section called “Dry Dockers” who miss the paddle and do just the bike and run. A couple of KM into the mountain bike leg I started catching large slow groups of them and they were difficult to get past on the single track. Unfortunately one guy signaled me past and he lost control as I was beside him, he locked handle bars with me and took me down. I lost about 45 seconds here getting back on the bike and going again but luckily missed all the rocks I crashed onto. Another group walking and blocking the track at the top of the hill even though 2 of us were yelling “track” at them as we rode up to them. Another dismount to get through them and then it was much better. Still got stuck behind another couple but the last half of the lap and the next lap were Ok. I didn’t go all out on the bike because I knew I had my weakest leg to come but still managed the fastest bike time in male vets category.

Back into transition and Sharon helped me to less than a minute this time to swap shoes and dump my helmet and gloves. The first 3k of the run I though I was going to die! You run around towards the dam and it is rocky, steep in places and a bit muddy at times. Once I got to the Hoo Hoo hut and around Deadmans Knob I had settled into a rhythm. A guy passed me with 1.5km to go and I suspected I was probably racing him but I upped the pace as much as I could and he sailed away into the distance finishing 1 minute in front of me.

The pain face after 8.5km of run hell.

I crossed the line in 22nd place overall (including teams) and placed 3rd in male veterans, not a bad day out for an OK paddler and biker who can’t run. I was a little surprised in the results however that my run was not “that slow” after all but it didn’t make me feel any better about running. The guy who passed me beat me into second place as I suspected.

So I have retired from running again and set a new goal already that is probably the biggest challenge I will do in a long time. I’m training for it now but you will have to wait and see what it is down the track a bit once it’s locked in for sure.

The IceBreaker overall results are here and category results here.

IceBreaker website is here.

Look for the all red boat in the middle pack.