Grueling Finish!!

Saunders Subaru Triathlon Victoria Race Report

I knew coming into this race, everyone was gunning for me.

No longer are the days when I can remain anonymous and shy away from finishing poorly. People of all ranks probably know me from my smiley grins, from my recently publicized newsletter and brochures, or from my impeccably-consistent finishing times. My reputation was on the line and uncomfortably nudged against it. All I really wanted was to earn my meal ticket for the ferry buffet and perhaps enjoy it with the company of friends. =)

I don’t blame rapidly improving athletes like Derrick Lee and Victoria Gilbert to trademark me as one of their soft targets. I admired their drive to improve oneself and I wished I knew a little more of their training secrets.

That said, Vincent Lavallee’s words "grueling finish" pretty much summed up the highlight of this race. Victoria Gilbert had home field advantage and was gunning me down. It was an epic display of hard work and very rarely does a 5 hour or so race comes down to a final sprint between one of your friends.

It’s funny that I can remember vividly the last kilometre of the run, and not the entire prior of the race. I had heard footsteps but didn’t bother to shoulder check because I had thought it was the same running dude behind me for the lap.

Victoria had totally caught me by surprised at 19km on the run when she passed me, with only 1km to go. The popular term of getting “chicked” was no big deal for me (Jen Moroz had previously destroyed me the day before at the Easter Seals 24 hours Relay opening rabbit run lap – hey I was the top male finisher! =)). I had even contemplated on letting Victoria beat me, but quickly realized nobody would have believed me. As a team, Victoria and I literally ran over a lot of runners in the final kilometre. At one point, Victoria rudely yelled “BEHIND!!” when we were trying to pass people, I felt a bit sorry for them.

Did someone manage to catch a video of the final sprint? This is pretty much what had happened. 

Would you capture it...or just let it slip?

Check out Theresa Price's complete team report here.