You haven't ever trained in Germany before the Ironman, so I've always had a base camp
in France with Triathlon New Zealand, but that's no longer happening, so I heard Chris
McCormick was coming here as well and Lothar Leader as well, so good training partners
and just with the New Zealand boys in the Darmstadt team, they've told me good stories
about the training, the Kiwi boys here, the association that they've had with Triathlon
in New Zealand, so there's been probably six or seven New Zealand athletes that have been
in the Darmstadt club.
Isn't there a good training condition there?
Yeah, yeah, that's fantastic, running, you've got forests everywhere, so you're always
running on soft ground, there isn't Germany, you've got 80 million people, you think the
country would be full of people, but there's so many regions where you can have fantastic
runs.
I think it's no problem, I mean I've had a lot of great times here, I've won the race
in 2006 and three seconds I think, so I've had a lot of times and then I've gone on
to Hawaii and finished on the podium four times, there's four months in between Germany
and October, so there's plenty of times you recover, you have to be careful, that's plenty
of time, so I've done it for many, many years.
You try and run a marathon, it's just so hard on the body, so it's great for new people
coming into the sport as well, because they don't get scared of doing a 3.8 kilometre swim
in a marathon, it's an easy swim and then everyone can bike, most people can run, but
the shorter run helps them as well, so it's an easy distance for athletes, getting into
a stepping stone to getting into longer distances.
I think you can have a look at their form everyday training and see how they're going, but we're
all friends and the only time when we're, you know, enemies is on July 4th when we race
in Frankfurt, so it's great having Chris here, if I didn't have him here, it'd be very,
very hard to push myself, you know, day in, day out, so you need training partners and
it's, you know, sometimes you have to have days with them and then days away to recover
and make sure you don't, you know, push yourself on those easy days, so that's the important
days that you have to look out for.
It's a nice time, you start to have more time to do things and relax, so yeah, but it's
a, looking forward to getting out there.
How long do you swim, how long do you bike, how long do you run?
Still, you know, today still rode four hours, ran, you know, half an hour off the bike and
we swam, you know, an hour, ten hour, fifteen at the pool tonight, so it's really next week
that the, you know, the tapering really starts, but you have to, you have to keep doing things
every day, otherwise, for me, I tend to lose, lose my fitness, so, you know, I think in
a short course race, you can taper quite a lot, but in a long distance, just has to
slowly step down.
Another fantastic field, you know, Chris McCormick has won the race, Timo Brack has won the race
twice, Andreas Rulliet, you know, he's third at Hawaii last year, so, and then, you know,
a whole lot of other Germans, so it's a very, very hard race and, you know, I always expect
that, but this is why I come here, because the best in the world are always here.
