Xterra World Championships

Xterra World Championships Maui 2012

Richard Ussher / 06.11.2012

The Xterra World Championships in Maui had been my main goal for the last six months. I’d had opportunities to be more specific with my training, great support from many different areas and I’d also scaled back many of my racing commitments prior to the race to try and get myself there in the best possible shape.  My goal was to try and get on the top few steps of the podium.

With 8th place in 2011, and less than 3 minutes back I had worked incredibly hard on the aspects of my race where I thought I could find the additional 3 minutes and all the numbers in training were pointing to being able to get that and more.

We arrived in Maui after a week back in NZ following the Wulong Outdoor Quest in China, it had been a reasonably easy week back home just trying to recover. The body was definitely tired after 20 hours of racing in China but was starting to feel pretty good and I was confident that I’d be 100% with 6 more days to rest and acclimatize before the race.

It was super nice to finally have some hot weather and made the training really enjoyable. For the days leading in I kept things pretty easy with just a few controlled efforts and day-by-day things seemed to be falling into place.

The evening before the race we were just getting ready to go to sleep when we were alerted that the Hawaiian Islands were in the path of a potentially devastating Tsunami.

As more information came to hand it was obvious we were about to be evacuated and sure enough by 9 o’clock the sirens were sounding and all the lower lying areas of the islands were moved to higher ground.  Not ideal but with everyone in the same boat if anything I thought it would be even more of an advantage – just like an AR race where surprises and lack of sleep are just part of the equation.

As luck would have it my Twitter post was picked up by Steve Nichol’s, an Aussie athlete who very generously offered a fold out couch to stay on outside of the evacuation zone.

The question on everyone’s mind was would there even be a race the next morning.

The predicted time of arrival came and went and a few very disappointed sounding scientists admitted they had thought the waves would be far bigger than they turned out to be, instead of 2.2 meters the waves that arrived were not even 40cm high.

The next morning it was business as usual for the race, bike racking, body marking and gearing up for 2 ½ hours of pain.

Went the gun finally went I was able to get off the beach pretty cleanly, it certainly made a big difference with only the pro athletes in the first wave to start. By the first buoy it seemed like things were still going OK but on the next leg to the beach the pack split and once again I was in the wrong half and rapidly losing ground to the front portion. The pace felt pretty easy but I just didn’t seem to have any spark to take the effort up and despite attempting to bridge across I came into the beach with the second group.