Monday, February 18, 2008

Its a great week to be Australian! Or at least a "wannabe"!

Dear All

Well, its a great start to week # 6 of our Half Ironman program with some great sporting results from over the weekend! We'll come back to the Rotto results in a mo...but in case you haven't already heard the amazing news that West Australian Eamon O'Sullivan absolutely smashed Alexander Popov's world 50m record for the freestyle event at the NSW Championships. O'Sullivan completed the distance in 21.56 seconds to become the fastest swimmer in the world...ever! Amazing. More news here:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h6egO7eAxZGrNl5QYnYXBjLGITmw What makes this accomplishment so special is Eamon's exemplary battle with injury over the last 2 years, remaining headstrong and focused on his goal of gold medal at the Beijing Olympics (he even played down the WR yesterday, saying that "he mustn't lose sight of the goal" - pretty inspirational if you ask me!!). He goes by the nickname of "The Silent Assassin" and whilst I'm not sure how 'silent' he'll keep himself after this result, his attitude is deserved of great admiration. This so-called "flying under the radar" (which I'm always talking about) is so necessary...as much as you should reward yourself for a good training session when these occur, the most important thing is to keep riding 'high' when you have a less-than-favourable session. Take last week for example...a lot of us felt pretty flat out there (me especially)...the true question though is whether we become dispondent and down about that or pick ourselves up and look forward to a good week this week...and for those of you down at running this morning, I could certainly see that spirit amongst ALL of you - so well done Team!

OK, official results are not yet out for the 2008 Rottnest Bankwest Channel Swim (a gruelling 19.5km channel crossing completed by 2100 swimmers in between 4 and 12 hours as either solo, duos or teams), however, I can confirm an absolutely outstanding result from our top-lane swimmer Mark Scanlon who finished 3rd overall in the event in just a shade over 5 hours!!! Mark can be seen in training action here:
http://swimsmooth.blogspot.com/2007/11/swimming-bands-only.html Two of our other top-lane swimmers (Judy Young and Rob Buckle) also had superb races to make it across to the island in 6h21 and 6h30 respectively for their first solo crossings. Well done chaps!

We had many people from the group compete in the duo and teams categories as well - I haven't heard any results from anyone else as yet apart from an excited test message from one very ecstatic Mary Tennants after her team made it all the way across - well done Mary! I would really appreciate everyone emailing me back as soon as you get chance to let me know how you went (times / places etc - any info you have), who you did it with, and a brief report of how you enjoyed the day...even if its just a couple of lines - we want to hear all about it!!! That includes those of you whom have just done 1-2-1 sessions with Paul if not with the whole squad.

Bike Session tonight:

Despite the rumours and the cooler weather, I have taken the "executive" decision (LOL!) to run tonights bike session on the road. This will be our final hills ride session. Meet at Reabold at 6pm for a 6.15pm start. We'll be riding over to Hale Road together to do some hills over there tonight. This is our last hills session before we get a little more serious about the 'flat' for Busso.

Today is a GREAT day! OK, too much caffeine perhaps...get a grip Paul! ;-)

Cheers

Paul

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