Last Sunday I headed inland to Lake Tinaroo for the Lake Tinaroo Sprint Triathlon, the last Triathlon on the Cairns Crocs calendar.

The race consisted of a 750m swim, 20km ride, and a 5km run.

I wasn’t expecting much of my body after Wednesday's Solar Eclipse Marathon where I placed sixth in 3:40 on a very tough course, but there were a couple of key areas that we were focussing on in preparation for the next main race and this race was a good chance work on those.

At the start line were my two rivals/mates - we always have a good race between us, so I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy day.

The gun went off and the race began with two laps of a triangular course in the fresh water dam. My swim was one of the worst I had done for a long time tactically, and I came out of the water toward the back end of the pack.

A quick transition to bike made up a few places and it was time to make up on the couple of minutes I had lost on the leaders.

The bike course was two laps of a hilly 10km up and back road, which had some great climbs that got the lungs going. The first 5km turnaround was a chance to see what position I was in and how far behind the leaders I was (I was sitting in twelfth about 1:30 behind the leader).

I made up more places and ground on the second lap of the bike to have myself up in third position and one minute behind the leader coming out of transition to the run leg.

I caught second place Nathan Sandford by the 500m mark of the run and then pushed on to catch leader John Grehan by 1.5km.

I decided to back off the pace and run with John and soon enough Nathan had caught up and together we all ran for about 2.5kms before I pushed on for a few hundred metres to open up a winning lead then coasted to a comfortable race win just ahead of Nathan Sandford and John Grehan.

I start two weeks of Taper now, where I begin to let the body repair and rejuvenate ahead of my last race of the season, Ironman 70.3 Phuket, (1.9km swim, 90km ride, 21.1km run) where I hope to finish in the top two of my category to qualify for the 2013 Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Las Vegas.