In a race that was not even half as exciting as the men’s race, Jocelyn McCauley has just shown once again that she is a world-class athlete; the American power woman won Ironman Texas by a huge margin. She took the lead early in the race and from that moment on there was only one mode: keep pushing.
During the swim, it was her compatriots Lauren Brandon and Rachel Zilinskas who turned out to be the fastest with swimming times of 50:31 and 50:35; McCauley came out of the water in third place and was then 5:36 minutes behind. That means work to do for McCauley and she understood that objective; on the bike she quickly made up time. After about forty kilometers she had already overtaken Zilinskas and was only one and a half minute behind Brandon, who could almost feel the hot breath of McCauley. Not much later McCauley came alongside.
Initially Brandon tried to catch up with McCauley and she succeeded for a while, but not for long. Just past the hundred-kilometer mark, McCauley rode away and went solo in the lead. From that moment on, her lead on the bike only increased, until she started the marathon with a lead of no less than seven minutes. Dede Griesbauer came back in third in T2 and was then nearly twelve minutes behind McCauley.
While there were still a lot of position changes around third place, it was immediately clear that McCauley and Brandon would claim the gold and silver. So they did; McCauley won the race in 8:58:13, while Brandon finished second in 9:10:43. In the end, bronze was for Switzerland’s Joanna Ryter, who started the marathon in eighth place and worked her way up to third. She finished in a time of 9:13:24.
