Last overseas trip of the year!

70.3 Asia Pacific Champs

We are currently in Busselton, Western Australia, for IRONMAN 70.3 Busselton on Sunday. It’s the 70.3 Asia Pacific Champs, my second to last race of the year, and last overseas race of the year. It’s been a long year, but the excitement levels are high to finish as strong as possible :)

The trip over was mostly smooth, despite being quite a long trip. We did have a 5 hr delay leaving Auckland, which meant we arrived into Perth quite late (2am NZT, 9pm local time), and so we opted to stay our first night in Perth rather than driving the 2.5 hour drive down to Busselton as soon as we landed. But all our luggage arrived, so that’s a good trip in my eyes! (Triathlete’s no my angst here)

So far we have been enjoying Busselton. The coastline is beautiful with incredibly blue water and white sandy beaches. There are plenty of quiet roads to ride on, a friendly local pool near to where we are staying, and there’s a nice track along the coast for running. The town Busselton is pretty small, which is always my preference when going somewhere to race; logistically everything just runs smoother and easier in a smaller town.

We’ve found a couple of good cafes already thanks to recommendations from friends and the people here seem to welcome the race into the area which is really nice.

Outside of taper training this week, this morning I had a radio interview followed by filming for “The Fighting Chance” video which will be released sometime this week, tomorrow I am meeting with Slowtwitch as they want to take photos of my bike and do an interview, and the Pro Panel at 5pm (which will be 10pm NZT so fingers crossed I won’t be yawning too much!). And then Saturday will of course be the pro briefing and bike/gear racking. One thing I’ve had to learn to manage this year is the additional race week media requirements. If I’m honest, they stressed me out at the beginning of the year but I’m slowly becoming accustomed to it and with the races holding such importance, all energy is needed on race day so stressing on a couple of obligations isn’t worth it.

The weather on race day is looking like it will be pretty mild temperature-wise. The weather this time of year seems to be quite changeable. Tomorrow (Friday) we will have temps over 30deg according to the forecast, but race day has a high of only 21deg forecasted (?!). Actually, it is going to be warmer at home in NZ on Sunday!

I did do some heat acclimation training prior to this race in case we got a 30deg day, but turns out it may not be required. Being a summer girl, I actually love a good heat acclimation session, so not all was lost!

The main aim of this race is to score good points for the IRONMAN Pro Series. But we all come to the races aiming to win as well.

The women’s pro field here is impressive and interesting, there are a number of short course athletes stepping up to the longer distance, who are a bit of a question mark around how they will do, but it is known they can run quite fast off the bike in shorter distances so could be a real threat. Plus quite a few of us are aiming for the pro series, battling it out for points. So hopefully that will make for some interesting watching. The mens race also looks very competitive with a large field from Australasia too.

With the drop-down to 70.3, here’s a look at my fuelling plan for the race (thanks to TriKai)

• Precision hydration carb and electrolyte drink mix (30g carb, 500mg sodium per serve)

• SIS beta fuel gels (40g carb, 40g sodium, 200mg caffeine per gel)

• GU gels (23g carb, 55mg sodium per gel, no caffeine)

• And precision hydration sodium tablets (250mg sodium per tab)

I’ll make up a mix of these products to achieve 110g carb, 900-1000mg sodium, and around 100-200mg caffeine per hour for the bike (more caffeine towards the latter parts of the bike). And around 60g carb, 500mg sodium, 100mg caffeine per hour on the run.

Don’t forget to stock up (using the code HANNAH10) on your nutritional needs from our local distributor TriKai.

Thanks for reading!

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