Nick Saunders sent us this report on the weekend's middle distance race in Lisbon.

After Ironman New Zealand I took four weeks R&R and traveled around NZ, which was awesome! I returned to Jersey at the beginning of April and I have been back in training for five weeks.

I raced the Lisbon International over the weekend as I wanted to see what shape I was in. It was quite a competitive race, there were some good athletes out of the 300 so entered, and I knew it was going to be fast as it is a bit of a short course when compared to most half ironman-distance races. I think the times reflect this.

The start of the swim was interesting, they wanted us to hold onto the side of the pontoon that was being used for the Lisbon World Cup which was crazy... Some athletes refused and they eventually set us off without any warning! It was a two lap swim, not much speed in the arms at the moment so I soon lost the leaders before the first turn and settled in with the second pack. I made it out in just over 26 minutes.

Onto the bike and it was straight into an unwelcoming headwind for four laps, but at least it was fast on the way back. Jimmy Johnsen (DEN) set a cracking pace and was soon into the lead after the first lap, he would hold this lead onto the run. I caught the second main pack of Mathius Hecht, Pedro Gomez and Alun Woodward (to name a few) on the last of the four laps. By this time the temperature was up into the mid twenties Celsius.

A quick transition by long course standards and I was the first of the group out onto the run. I felt great for the first 5k and then started to fade. I ran with Gomez for a while until I was dropped and then got passed by Monteiro on the second lap. With about 500m to go I started to cramp and was passed by Alun Woodward who timed his run well and I crossed the line in 9th place and 150 Euro richer after tax. Nice one! Full results are here.