Steve McKenna Heads To The USA To Take On World’s Best at Oceanside

The 30-year-old kicks off his international campaign at IRONMAN 70.3 Oceanside in California this Saturday, lining up in one of the strongest fields ever seen at the event.

McKenna will be one of 60 professional men racing in California, taking on the 1.9km swim, 90km ride and 21.1km run.

“I’m heading to Oceanside to see what I’ve been missing out on for the last two years,” said McKenna. “To see how much the rest have progressed on the bike in the US and internationally because we’ve been doing our own little thing here in Australia. After this weekend I go away and train in Boulder for five or six weeks and race one race in Los Angeles which is a week before IRONMAN 70.3 Chattanooga, the North American Championship.

“I think I’m going to be so well prepared for the second two races and I’m going into this weekend feeling fit but very unprepared by my standards,” he said. “I’ve had less training than usual and it’s been messy but there’s been some positives, when you don’t have time you do everything on the trainer and I’m pushing better numbers than I ever have, it’s just that I’m keeping in the back of my head that I haven’t done as much as usual.”

Joining McKenna on the start line at IRONMAN 70.3 Oceanside are some of the biggest names in triathlon, including British Olympic gold medallist Alistair Brownlee, Americans Ben Kanute and Sam Long, Canada’s Lionel Sanders and fellow Australian Sam Appleton.

McKenna, who finished second behind Appleton at IRONMAN 70.3 Geelong last month, is preparing to step up from the smaller fields he’s raced in at home for the last two years.

“I have really liked long course racing where there’s just 20 guys on the start line because your swimming strength will come out eventually, but if you’re just on the edge of making the pack with Brownlee and Kanute and Appleton it’s left to chance that if you screw up that first hundred metres, you’re going to have to redline it to get to them and if you don’t redline it you’re stuffed and in the next pack, pretty relaxed but you’ve missed that opportunity,” he said. “It makes me a little bit nervous having a lot of people on the start line but I am used to it from the one year that I did in ITU where there was probably 100 on the start line in the French Grand Prix so you just have to pretend that you enjoy it, even though you’re just as nervous as the guys who hate wrestling in the water.

“You’ve just got to be fired up for it, I’m going to try and be in the right headspace, it only takes 400 metres and then everyone stops and leaves you alone,” said McKenna. “I’m just going to think about it like that, you’ve got two minutes to be a hard unit and then you can just race like you want to the rest of the time.”

While McKenna finalises his preparations for this weekend’s race he has one eye on October’s IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship, set to be held in St. George, Utah.

“Going over early is really good for me because then I’ve got the whole year to switch on and know that I’ve either got a lot of work to do or I’m nearly there and just keep pushing,” he said. “My main goal for this year is to finally put myself up against these guys, I’ve just never done it. In 2019 I wasn’t ready, so I did the Asian races and I won a lot of them and you have one or two good guys rock up to those races and I was beating them but put them all in the same race and I need to keep a level head, I need to normalise racing these guys so that’s why I’m going over early.”