But a charging Jelle Geens (Belgium) and Kristian Blummenfelt (Norway) lit a fuse in Wilde as he once again put his foot down on the gas to keep the fast-closing challengers at bay. <\/p>\n
In the end, Wilde did just enough to hold on for the win, breaking the tape in three hours 50.51 minutes \u2013 just 18 seconds ahead of Blummenfelt, with reigning Ironman 70.3 World Champion Geens rounding out the podium.<\/p>\n
Wilde dropped his watch heading out of the final transition, and says his brain had to work overtime to figure out his advantage with about two kilometres remaining.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s awesome to execute a race,\u201d said Wilde. \u201cI was coming down the Promenade and hit about 15km and the legs felt really good, and I was like yeah, we\u2019ve ticked that box since Taup\u014d, now I just keep chugging along and I got to that 19km mark and really had to dig deep. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere was still a 32 second gap, so I was doing calculations in my head where I was thinking if I just keep this pace \u2013 I didn\u2019t have a watch \u2013 it just felt like 3.10 pace, then Kristian has to run sub 3.00 pace to catch me. So I just said, keep chugging, keep chugging, get over this little pinch and run downhill. It\u2019s still sinking in, to be honest, but it\u2019s just nice to get it done.<\/p>\n
\u201cComing out of T2 I had all my things in my hand, and I kicked my watch, and I think I kicked it all the way into the marina \u2013 so I might have to go and buy a new one. So that was a bit frustrating. I look at the race, and it wasn\u2019t a perfect race for me, there were a few things that were errors, but I was just really happy with how I executed the run. <\/p>\n
\u201cWith 5km to go, I was able to hold on. The last 2km was punishing, but, you know, a great quote from Kristian is, \u2018it\u2019s worse to lose\u2019, and yeah, it definitely is, so to hold on is something special for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But a charging Jelle Geens (Belgium) and Kristian Blummenfelt (Norway) lit a fuse in Wilde as he once…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[121866,295842,18239,2741,63787,78,22961,194,118295,41722,94586,111,139,16408,152912,69,25292,85522,213,9348,2563,30909,93836,6202,377],"class_list":["post-600255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-121866","tag-blummenfelt","tag-championship","tag-claim","tag-hayden","tag-in","tag-ironman","tag-kiwi","tag-kristian","tag-maiden","tag-medallist","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nice","tag-norways","tag-nz","tag-olympic","tag-pursuit","tag-sports","tag-survived","tag-title","tag-triathlon","tag-wilde","tag-wins","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}