Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Corporate multisport challenge

On Saturday 13 October I competed in a team with four work colleagues in the corporate multisport challenge. This race consisted of (originally) a 7 km kayak, a 25 km mountain bike, a 29km road bike (me) and a 7km mountain run.

My team was Gari Bickers (Kayak, and coast to coaster), Bruce Smith (mountain bike and head of our modelling and forecasting section at work), myself and Karen Bradley (run and from our transmission team). We are all on the 9th floor. We were up against a 7th floor work team as well. This team was: Michael (Ruth's partner for the kayak), Ruth Murphy (mountain bike and finance manager), Richard Norris (road bike and head of electricity effiociency section) and Kevin Lampen Smith (run, CFO and my boss).

The day didn't start so well as the weather meant that the kayak was changed to a four lap course of Days Bay with a LeMans start. The mountain bike leg was shortened as the river crossing was flooded, this shortened the road bike as well (but only the down wind leg and not the hard leg into the wind). We were faced with 140kmh gusty north westerlies (hmmm sounding familiar to other posts on my blog).

As the mountain bike course was shortened we didn't have much time to get to the transition and I was frantically getting changed in the back seat of the car in preparation. This meant no warm up for my cycle.

The road bike started with about 2km South on the Wainui coast rd. You know you're in trouble when you're hitting 60kph+ on the bike with a tailwind one way and you're barely pedalling. Definitely bodes badly for the return leg into the wind. The 25km took me 55 minutes (which is a slow time but I still managed to get the fastest women's cycle time and the 5th fastest cycle time overall. I carrried on afterwards for another 2 hours of cycling while my team finished the race. As a prize for the fastest cycle of the day I got an initial programme of simulated altitude training (http://www.io-nz.com/), which I have done before and had been meaning to do again which was awesome.

Offical results:
It was a close thing - we only just missed out on the placings.

4th place - 9th floor Ninjas 2:52:54
5th place - 7th floor Assassins 2:55:02

There were 33 teams in the mixed category. Strangely enough we would have come 2nd and 3rd if we had been in the open (i.e. all male) category.

Individual results:
Kayaking:
Gari - 29:23 - 6th out of 50
Michael (Ruth's partner) - 33:58 - 22nd

Mountain Biking:
Bruce - 39:48 - 6th out of 75
Ruth - 44:13 - 41st - and 2nd woman (half a minute away from first)

Road biking:
Jacinda - 55:14 - 5th out of 81 and 1st woman
Richard - 1:03:01 - 21st

Run:
Karen - 48:29 - 65th out of 81 and 18th woman
Kevin - 33:50 - 9th

Here are two photos of my cycle:

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