It’s been a long time since I last posted here, anyway I will write some lines to update on some sports related stuff 🙂

After racing Ironman Frankfurt I entered another 3 big races for the year:

– Viana do Castelo – Half Ironman: this was the last triathlon race of the season and since the IM was the big goal and was already behind me I decided to go all in for this race. So even if the swim was pretty cold (14C) and with some currents I had already made my mind and went put maximum effort on it, knowing that at worst things could go south and I would, for the first time get a DNF for the race. Well, it didn’t happen and in fact I did pretty well, even if my legs were totally destroyed after it. This were the time splits:

Swim – 35m04s
T1 – 2m39s
Bike – 2h35m20
T2 – 1m19s
Run – 1h26m37s
4h41m01s
Overall Pos 33

To be fair I must add that both the bike and run course were a little shorter (about 5km on the bike and 1km on the run) and also there were only about 100 triathletes, so coming in at 33 overall is not an overwhelming result.

– Lisbon Marathon 2014: just like last year I decided to race again in Lisbon, because the course is very scenic and logistics are of course simplified. Last year the race went on a very hot day, with temperature reaching about 34C and making most of the runners go slower. This time the weather was perfect and so I’ve managed to PR on this race. Which is kind of funny because apart from some not so well structured speed work it was perhaps the marathon for which I trained less km. So it was either all the build up from the IM or perhaps more quality instead of quantity training. So the results were:

PR 3h16 @ 4m38/km
Overall Pos 231/2900
Age group rank 58

And I was pretty happy with it.

 

Then in early November I ran Porto’s Marathon which took me almost 5 hours to complete, since I was out there just to have some fun with my brother’s first marathon (congrats!) and also a couple of good friends, also running the 42km for the first time. It was a very nice day until the final 3km when the pouring rain started. It was like hell broke loose but, it was truly epic to take my brother around the last km under such an inclement rain. Definitely something we should never forget.