Beach Series Race 14

I had a good race last night, but it probably had as much to do with the course, as anything. I was about 40 seconds faster than last week, though that's not saying much, the course was a mess last week, and I was out of breath at the start. Last night the tide was the lowest I'd seen, so the lines between the two ends were a lot closer to straight. Anyway this was my fastest post-holidays race, but still about 60 seconds slower than my fastest pre-holidays time. I suppose there's just no substite for running several times a week.

As I expected, I've moved in to 4th place in my age group for the series total points. I'm about 70 points behind the 3rd place guy, and about 50 ahead of the 5th. I've never beaten the guy above me, and we've both got 10 good races on the score sheet, so I think we're pretty much settled into our final ranking. Bummer, one of those Flight Centre travel vouchers would have been nice. ;-)

A couple interesting things were going on last night. Just as the race was winding up (luckily for the kayakers) a fairly large cruise ship was leaving the harbour and passing between Takapuna beach and Rangitoto Island. Just my luck, my camera batteries were dead when I went to grab a shot of it with all the kayaks in the foreground. Ah well, I'll repost one of the photos from the series site here when they go up. I'm guessing there'll be at least one shot that's pretty close to the one I wanted to take.

There was also a TV crew there filming something for Sky TV and TV One. I thought I heard them say something's airing on TV One on March 22nd. That's a Sunday, so it might be a profile of Rob Matthews a blind guy who did the swim last week, for the TV Show Attitude?

Not sure what the Sky TV thing would be, but there are a half dozen or so current Olympic team members who show up every week. Could be some background sort of footage for anything on any of them.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	23rd	Low tide course - out of shape.
10	23:23	30th	Low tide course - still losing fitness.
12	22:05	26th	Perfect weather, hard work.
13	22:30	21st	Perfect weather, some loose sand and splashy bits. Still feeling Sunday's run.
14	21:49	23rd	Perfect weather. Very low tide.

Splits:

Leg	Last Week	This Week
Start to South End	4:04	4:07
South End to North End	5:50	5:29
North End to South End	5:48	5:41
South End to North End	5:42	5:25
North End to Finish	1:04	1:07

Not too much to say about the splits. I went out fast again, but I was well rested at the start this time, so I held the pace together this time. I don't recall feeling slack on that middle leg, so that may have been headwind, or it may have been that it's tougher to pick out the best line on that leg with the majority of the run field in your face on the first run back. Anyway, happy with the race, going to be damn tough to improve on this one next week. Need to get at least two good workouts in between now and Sunday.