Racing the clock

As I get older, I learn more and more about myself everyday. Over the past 6 months I have learned that I need goals in my life. I need things to strive for or I struggle for motivation. The City 2 Surf was the last of my running goals I set when I gave up smoking. It's always been one of my favourite races and is one I really wanted to do well in. Unfortunately I didn't get under my goal time of 50mins, I could only manage a 51. Seems I have a problem where I come up 1 short :) Remember the Gold Coast Marathon? Want sub 3 went 3:01. WTF? I'm not disappointed and am not making any excuses. I gave it my best and that's all I could have given. On the other hand I have learnt a few valuable training lessons and plan on never making particular mistakes again.

Happy with a PB but really wanna go under 50mins one day.

Good gang that ran for the WSPA raising money for the animals.

Yes I did lose a bet with Hoppo and will be wearing this while
 rollerblading the promenade at Bondi at some point this summer. OH DEAR !!

1 out of 3 isn't bad... so close on the others :(

I'll never be a podium athlete and it's something I'm totally cool with. I just really enjoy always trying to better myself. There are people on this planet that have to work really hard do well at their sport of choice and then there are people with natural ability. Unfortunately I am not the latter. Don't get me wrong, people with natural ability still have to work hard to achieve their goals but things like running and swimming, to name a couple,  just seem to come easier to some than others. Take my good buddy Whippet for example. I've been working with Whippet on the beach now for about 10 years. Whippet is a natural athlete, full stop. He excels and slots into the "above average" bracket at anything he has a go at. Kerr Box is another one, must be something in the water at Bronte where they both grew up. I'll never forget one year, many moons ago, it was time for us to do our annual Lifeguard test and many of us, Whippet and myself included, had only just returned from Indonesia after filming the Bondi Rescue Bali spin off show. Now I'm not going to lie,  we had more than just good time over there and training was replaced by way to many nights drinking bintangs and jungle juices in many of the island paradise's beautiful plunge pool bars. This act of treating our bodies like rental cars led us being "VERY" out of shape and nervous about the 800m pool swim we had to do in under 13mins. Oh and the M-Shape (run, swim & board course) we had to do down at the beach right after. That year, thanks to some ridiculous cram training I just scraped in swimming a 12:59 in the pool and I'm pretty sure I came last in the M-Shape with 3 seconds to spare before I would have failed and had to re do my tests a month later. Whippet on the other hand, jumped in the pool with, I think 1 light training session up his sleeve and swam a 9:55, then on his way to the beach for the M-Shape, wobbles through McDonalds drive through and orders a breakfast that even Fat Albert would've been sweating over. He then proceeds to beach and comes 1st in the Ironman course. Now I don't care what anyone says, without natural ability, you just can't do that...

I have set myself some new goals and am taking on a whole new sport... Look out Triathlon world, myself and some of the lifeguard boys are coming to get our asses kicked by you. This all came about when some of us went to IM Melbourne and raced in a team, we got a little taste of how amazing the sport of Ironman triathalon really is and we want more. There is 5 of us lifeguards that are signed up for Port Mac 70.3. It's only a half Ironman, but I have no doubt its going to put me right in my place at the bottom of the Ironman food chain. On the other hand, I'm really looking forward to the challenges that lay ahead. For most of us the bike leg will be very testing. I personally know I have a lot of work to do on the bike and in the swim but hopefully, thanks to the help of an Australian champion triathlete, Spot Anderson, I can improve on my weaknesses and improve. Spot owns Bondi Fit where he helps people from all walks of life achieve their lifelong swimming, biking and running goals.

New set of goals:

Port Mac 70.3 (half ironman) Oct - Lose my virginity to IM triathlon !
Noosa Tri (olympic distance) Nov - Enjoy the festival and have a crack at Olympic distance !
Perth IM (full ironman) Dec - Just hope to finish my first & get the Monkey off my back !
Melbourne IM (full ironman) Mar 2013 - Have a real good crack at it & try to go under 11hrs !

Riding with Whip and Bacon... We are such lycra rookies...

Rookie mistakes: Bike riding in fingerless gloves in winter is one I will never make again.

My beautiful Giant bike is my new girlfriend... She sleeps in my bed and we never fight... ever.

In other news, we just had our annual lifeguard physical tests and this year was an extra special one for me. Today was the first lifeguard pool swim and M-Shape surf ironman test I have done as a non-smoker and boy did it feel good. First up we had the pool swim and I was hoping to go under 11mins. It was a big ask but I thought I may just get there with all the extra swimming training I had been doing. After giving it to myself I came in 11:13. Still happy but much more work to do. Next we went down to the beach for our IM and I came out of the water after the first swim mid field. The one thing I really did notice being a non-smoker was while in the transition from the swim to the board where I would normally be gasping for breath, I found myself feeling good and having a laugh. After another swim, 2 boards and 2 runs I finished up 3rd behind Whippet and Azza. I've never finished 3rd at anything In my life so I knew something must have happened and I found out later Hoppo and Maxi got held up for some reason and I had to give myself the 5th. I'm still happy with the 5th and am looking forward to my next showdown with Chappo in the lifeguard challenge in Feb. Hopefully it's a little closer than today and I don't beat him by a good 3 minutes again :)

Also, a little while back I was out playing around shooting some underwater photos of Whippet and Corey as the water was so clear and a pod of Dolphins decided to swim straight into the bay at Bondi. Check it out here: 

I will do my best to keep this blog updated more often but since taking up this crazy sport of Triathlon and and my many jobs I very rarely get any free time. Im thinking about switching to a Vlog and just post pictures with captions on here also. What do you all think?

Thanks for stopping in :)

Reidy

My confession

Wow it's been a long time since I've written a blog post, I hope you're all still interested. This one will be short and sharp but I am going to be getting back on the blog program over the next month and start to do it every 2 weeks or so. 

My life is almost taken a total 180 since March this year, well maybe not a 180 but a few things have definitely changed dramatically. Around 3 months ago I set 3 big goals for myself. The 1st of them to try and run the 21.1km Sydney Half Marathon in under 80mins. The 2nd being to run the 42.2km Gold Coast Marathon and try go Sub 3hours. And the 3rd to run the 14km City to Surf in under 50mins.

Now I know some of you think I'm already pretty fit and the goals I have set myself aren't that hard. Well I have a confession to make, I've been a closet, 12 a day smoker for the past 20 years of my life. Some of you might say its disgusting and I am inclined to agree with you. It's not something I'm proud of and I really did always hate it but unfortunately I was addicted. Funnily enough, I could always pass my physical tests for work but was just never really competitive when it came to our lifeguard races. I was always in the bottom 10 and always had this attitude that "If I could still pass my tests then it can't be doing me much harm" or so I thought. Its a whole new world out there once you are released from its claws and thats exactly what happened after I was hypnotised.

Since meeting my saviour, Lucy the Hypnotherapist from Lucidmind 6 months ago my life hasn't been the same. I can't put into words how much better my life is now and for what she did for me I will be forever be truly grateful.

Nick Chappy my buddy from Shift 60 put together a training program for me and the fun began.

First up was the Sydney Half Marathon where I wasn't overly confident of breaking 80mins as I'd only been training properly for about 4 weeks and my PB over that distance was 86mins. I ended up running coming in at 78:21 and was over the moon.

Nick Chappy and I happy after the race.

Very happy with my time.

Next up was the Gold Coast Marathon but unfortunately it didn't quite go to plan. After my Half Marathon time I got overly confident and made a huge rookie mistake thinking I could maybe run a 2:50. I went out way to hard and blew up at the 27km mark, things went down hill really quickly after that. I ended up running a 3:01 and was devastated. The thing that got to me the most is that I know I could have gone 2:59 and I would have reached my goal. It was still a 7min PB for me as the last Marathon I ran in Melbourne was a 3:08 so I was still happy but I will get under the 3 hour mark one day. The highlight of the weekend was by far the after party the crew at BodyScience put on for us after. We had a house right on the beach with DJ's, fun people and ice cold Coronas!

With Dan Mac at the start line!

Running 3:55 per Km and thinking I'm killing it at 10km mark.

High 5's all round at the 20km mark.

Okay, welcome to the hurt locker, 32km mark... GET ME OUTTA HERE, I WANT TO QUIT...

Best party ever... Thanks BSc

In 4 days time I will try and reach my 3rd goal. In 4 days time I'm going to try and run the race of my life. In 4 days time Christmas comes to runners and the gun for the 41st City 2 Surf will be fired. The C2S is, as far as I'm concerned is one of the greatest fun runs on the planet. 85.000 people all running 14km's from the city to get to the beach and have a beer. What more could anyone want? This will be the 7th time I have run it but only the 2nd time Ill be racing it and hoping for a fast time. The last time I raced it was 4 years ago and came in around 53mins. This year as you know, my original goal was to break the 50min but things got interesting the other night at the footy when Hoppo, Kerr Box and I were exchanging some friendly banter over a beer. Many people don't know this but Hoppo used to be a very good runner back in the day. He only weighed 72 kilos and ran the City to Surf in a blistering time of 48:52. Well anyway, the challenge was thrown down and a bet was waged (thanks to Kerr Box). If I beat Hoppo's time of 48:52 in this years race Hoppo has to Rollerblade 2 laps of Bondi's promenade in a specially made Body Science Leopard print Mankini. If I DONT make the time then I have to... GULP... Now if any of you have ever seen Hoppo or I on rollerblades then you will understand that its not healthy for either of us to be doing it.

Very honoured to get a seeded bib, hope I do it proud...

Ciao for now...

Reidy :)

I want to be an IRONMAN !

Sunday 25th of March 2012 was the day a seed was planted in head. That seed is to grow into making me an IRONMAN ! 

Our adventure to Ironman Melbourne 2012 all started the day of our 100km treadmill team world record attempt up at Shift60 gym in Bondi. We had just smashed the record and raised much need funds for the Kids Foundation. After the event I was chatting to a lady from the Kids foundation named Susie. Susie is an IRONWOMAN herself and was telling me all about her experiences in these crazy races that can last up to 17 hours. She mention that her foundation received an entry into the teams section for this years Melbourne Ironman and asked if we would like put a team in with myself doing the Marathon run leg, yes all 42.2 Kilometers of it. I was hesitant at the time as I had only ever ran one before on the Gold Coast and swore black and blue I'd never do it again. With only about a month to prepare and after chatting with Adrial "Bacon" Young (swim) and Clint "Clipper" Kimmins (bike) we decided we'd do it. What had I gotten myself into?!

To prepare in total I think I ran about 100km over 2 weeks. It probably wasn't the best preparation but all I could think was "hey, if there will be people doing all 3 legs on their own, surely I can get through a marathon by myself".

Biggest run before the marathon was 30km Many-Bondi with V

Another training run. 16km

Before I knew it, Saturday the 24th of March had arrived and we were down in Melboure getting ready to race the next day. There was another motivator in Team KIDS Fdn's race as another lifeguard team from Bondi was entered as Team Ironman Aus. Now as most of you know we are quite the competitive type and neither wanted to lose! The other team, made up of some very athletically talented lifeguards was  Ryan "Whippet" Clark (swim) Greg "Bisho" Bishop (bike) and Gavin "Bagas" Stevenson (run) and they wanted to beat us as bad as we wanted to beat them but it was all friendly of course. 

After a huge carbohydrate loading session together for dinner we said our goodnights to each other and went to bed knowing at some point the next day we were each going to be in "THE HURT LOCKER" !


It was a 4:00am when we woke on Sunday morning which is never nice but the weather was perfect for IRONMAN racing with no wind and cool temperatures. We packed the car and left our hotel in St Kilda and headed 40km south to the sleepy little town of Frankston where the IRONMAN race was to start at 7:00am. Once there Bisho and Clipper made some last minute adjustments to their very expensive bikes and we headed down to the water to see the start of the race and wish Whippet and Bacon luck in their 3.8km swim in a dark and Murky Port Phillip bay.

About 16 million $ worth of bikes here...

Final bike adjustments

Whippet and Bacon, ready to swim.

Swimmers setting off in the dark.

With very minimal training, Whippet, being the freak of nature he is in the water came out of the swim in (49:03) just in front of Bacon by about 1min & 45sec. He went so hard he actually vomited as he ran up the beach but that kind of determination from both of them for their teams set the standard for how we were going to race for the rest of the day.

Bacon gassed..

After a very quick change over by both teams, Bisho and Clipper were on their way to hell (so to speak). They had 180km of road ahead of them and 2 team mates each that wanted them back first.

Clipper and Bisho, ready to roll...

Timing chip change over.

Lets go Clipper...

Clipper is a former pro surfer, Gold Coast lifeguard and now an IRONMAN in the making. He has been training very hard and is set to do his own full IRONMAN in a few months time up in Cairns so he was always going to have an advantage over Bisho as he had only trained about 8 times on the bike due to work and other commitments. Although you can never... ever underestimate someone with Bisho's athletic ability.

The bike riders were hammering along.

The turn around point before heading out for another 90km

Clipper came in after about 4hours and 57mins of pedalling his guts out and passed the timing chip off onto me with Bisho coming in only 44mins behind him sending Bagas on the hunt to run me down.

Bacon decided to try and throw Bagas off his game by interrupting his nap before his run. I thought it was funny :)

One of my motivators..

So here I was, running my second ever marathon. I was a little nervous and even more excited, but mentally ready. I did my first kilometre in 4:11. Way to fast ! In my only other marathon I underestimated the distance and just crumbled around the 35km mark from going out to hard so there was no way I was going to let that happen to me again and pulled back a little. Not to much though as I know Bagas is a good runner and I wanted to win this one for my team. I ran the next 36km at an average of 4:29 per km and felt really good. The whole course was fantastic, quite flat for the first 20km with some slight hills in the last 22km. There was aid stations at every 2km and crowds cheering you on every time you looked up and needed motivating. Around the 36km mark another teams runner came up behind me and we ran together for the last 6km, pushing each other harder and faster with every km. His name was Rob and he was a very good runner, I knew it was going to come down to a sprint finish. Once I could see the finish line about 1km away I remembered why I was there. To raise awareness for the Kids foundation and do my best for my team so I just took off and went for it. I could hear Rob's feet, he was staying with me. He was right on my tail for at least the next 500m so I kept on pushing myself until I couldn't hear him anymore. I ran that last km in 3:47 and crossed the line with my teammates Clipper and Bacon in an overall time of 8 hours and 57 minutes. We were so stoked and ended up 4th in the open mens team. I couldn't feel the pain from my run just yet, I was to excited from smashing my first marathon time of 3:18 by 10mins and running a 3:08. Bagas came in not long after me and also crossed the line with his teammates with a personal best marathon time of 3:35. It was especially a great effort from Bagas as his training was also minimal because of his wedding 2 weeks prior to the race. There were smiles all round from both teams as everyone had given their best for each other. We were all 1/3 of an IRONMEN and proud of it !

14km out and the white pins are feeling good. Thanks for the pic @Kelscha

My Garmin stats

The course

Bagas was Happy but Sore !

Being the blokes we are, we all had a thirst for a well deserved beer after a big day. We raced back to our hotel, had a hot shower, donned some fresh threads and headed back to the finish line to talk story and be inspired by the other athletes that had already finished and to watch others finish. We even got the honour of catching some of the athletes with IRONMAN towels as they finished, it really was amazing!

Well deserved beers

Bacon met his hero, Greg Welsh. 5 x World IRONMAN champ

One on the many legend solo finishers

IRONMAN is one of the greatest experiences of my life. The men and women that do these races solo are all my heroes. It doesn't matter if you're a professional like Craig Alexander winning in a time of 7:57 or you're just an average Joe or Jane finishing in the dark in a time of 16:50 you are a true champion to me. They put their bodies through hell and come out legends and I am in awe of you all.


My next goal is to be back there next year doing it solo. I want to be one of them. I want to join that elite club of legends.

My little IRONMAN buddy...

IRONMAN, I will be back...


Reidy :)