HALF IRONMAN - Long-term benefits behind Warriner's distance switch

Sam Warriner's penchant for a heavy pre-season workload has opened up an opportunity for the triathlete to compete in a new form of race event this season.
Warriner flies to Australia on Wednesday - after an appearance at tomorrow night's Halberg Awards in Auckland where she is nominated in the Sportswomen of the Year category - to race in the Australian 70.3 Championships on the Gold Coast on Sunday.
The 70.3 is an international half-ironman event, which is almost two-thirds longer than the Olympic distance. Warriner is the current ITU series world title holder.
"I've done ITU Olympic distance for all of my career really so this is a different challenge for me ... to be competitive at this distance is a big ask for me," she said.
Rather than turning toward the half-ironman distance as some sort of career change, Warriner said it was more about fitting in an extra competitive series with her training schedule.
"It's only because I'm doing my base training at this time of year - which is long slow-paced aerobic work - so the half-ironman distance fits in with that so well and that's the main reason I'm doing it," she said.
"Once the ITU season starts then I'll be straight into that but because the [half-ironman] races fit in so well with my base training, I thought I should just keep going for a bit longer to see if I can get that world championship spot."
The top 70 competitors (35 women, 35 men) across the line in Geelong will receive invitations to the 70.3 world championships in Clearwater, Florida in November.
Warriner's main focus of the year however, remains the ITU triathlon world championship series.
The ITU series has been remodelled this year to include just eight events and kicks off in Singapore on May 9-10. The final race in the series is the "Grand Final" held on Australia's Gold Coast on September 9-13, which gives Warriner the opportunity at its completion to continue her experiment with the longer distance.
"I'll have a few weeks off after the ITU series and then it's back to training (for the 70.3 world championships), it's my job at the end of the day and I've been enjoying trying the longer distances as well," she said.
Warriner's performance in the Port of Tauranga Half Ironman at Mount Maunganui in early January showed she has the ability to excel at the longer distance. She broke the 13-year record held by two-time world champion Jenny Rose by more than two-and-a-half minutes.
"Tauranga was a few weeks ago and things went well for me there but I have to focus on the race in Geelong now, and hope things go my way there," she said.
She is confident in the training she's done but the field will be a lot tougher. It includes Austrian Yvonne Van Vlerkan - who came second at last year's Kona Ironman World Championships - also former top five-ranked ironwomen like Hilary Biscay, Belinda Grainger and Rebeckah Keat.