Tauranga Half 2017 Race Report
Report By Lance Brew
Sunday morning and the radio clicks on to wake me up but it’s 4.00am. I leap outta bed as fast as I could so not to wake anyone else up in the house. Yep it’s race day – time to have a feed and start switching my mind on to what I’m about to do and that is race the Tauranga Half Marathon. The trip over to Tauranga was very entertaining at the least – I shall leave it at that, as don’t want to upset anyone, haha – eh Jason Hindrup (one of our new members).
Once rego’ed we head out for a warm up and I catch up with Jess Ruthe and have a chat about what we think may happen today. I’m lining up at the start line thinking I have’t done enough of a warm up and once the gun went it showed as it took me a good 6/7 km to get sorted even though I was moving quickly.
Once I settled myself down I found I was fighting for 3rd place and it was going to be a tough battle for the next 6/7 kms. With a bit of to-ing and fro-ing I decided I was going to have to lay down a quick effort to break away coming out of the the Memorial Gardens and heading back up the hill to town and it worked from there I had a free run home but this was different as now I was the hunted which in turn keep me honest and true. I pushed hard up the last hills to home and to my surprise as I got close to the finish shutte seeing the clock clicking through the 75 minutes I know I had to push again if I was to go sub 76 minutes and in the end it was close 75.58 boom I was done and had’t fallen over after finishing like I normally do and a 3rd placing as well.
Throwing back some fluid and having a chat with other finishes I look over and see Jason finishing strong in a t time of 88.14 minutes.
Well run event and I’m always happy to do this one and recommend it to all for next year apart from an early start.
