Hannah Wells has won every race she has entered this year and with one more next month, she's eyeing a 100 per cent success rate for 2019.
The Tauranga triathlete has just returned from Sydney this week after winning the Ironman 70.3 Western Sydney on Sunday, achieving her best result for a half Ironman distance, finishing her 1.9km swim, 90km bike, 21.1km run in four hours, seven minutes and 37 seconds.
She says her swim wasn't "that fast", finishing in a time of 27 minutes and four seconds, but with a 2hr, 17min, 5sec cycle and a 1hr, 20min, 49sec run, she knew she was in for a personal best (PB).
"It's quite a fast course as well and I saw my bike time and knew that I was in for like a pretty decent time because I had done a pretty fast run. It's quite flat, it's a good PB course that one but it was quite a big PB for me," Wells says.
She had just finished some aerodynamic testing in Melbourne before heading to Sydney for the event and the weekend's race win is just the latest of what has been a pretty solid year for the athlete.
Just this year alone, Wells has entered four half Ironman competitions, one marathon, a standard triathlon race, a half marathon and The Speed Project - a 550km running race she entered with a team of women running between Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the United States. In every one - despite spending weeks away from training due to falling ill, she has taken the top spot and with one more race to go in 2019, she wants to finish the year just as it's been going.
"It probably has gone better than what I expected. It's been kind of a crazy year," she says.
The success, she says, is from her continuous building over the last year in preparation for New Zealand's triathlon 2019-2020 season, which starts for her on December 7 with the Ironman 70.3 Taupō.
"It's my last race in 2019 and I'd like to try and finish with a win, that would mean I've won all the races I've entered this year."
She has extra motivation for Taupō next weekend as it was where she received her first Did Not Finish race result last year due to being struck by sickness.
"I entered Taupō last year and I actually got sick right before it so I didn't really do it. I started because I was there, you know, I was on the start line but I kind of started something that I knew I wasn't going to be able to finish because I felt pretty terrible."
She says she was disappointed but can't dwell in the past. She will be after some redemption for herself though.
"That was my first DNF so obviously there's a lot of disappointment involved in it but I couldn't help how I felt at all and there was no way I was able to finish in the way that I felt so there was literally nothing I could do.
"You can't dwell on those things too much because the reality is, these things happen."
Before that race though, she has another trip to Sydney planned - for work - and will unlikely be doing any training while there from Sunday to Tuesday.
A few days out, she'll start looking at race strategies.
"You kind of have to look at the course and what the course is like, and also look at the competition and then from there you can start trying to put together how you think you know, things could work out, or who might be ahead of me in the swim or who might be coming from behind."
She is expecting tough competition though, particularly from Australian Felicity Sheedy-Ryan - a professional triathlete with an impressive International Triathlon Union career, whom Wells hasn't raced before.
Wells says she just has to trust that she has done enough to take the win.
Once the Taupō race is completed, Wells plans to take at least a week off to recover mentally and physically from a gruelling year before getting back into training ahead of the Tauranga Half in January.
IRONMAN 70.3 Western Sydney - November 24, 2019:
1st: Hannah Wells, 4hrs, 7min, 37sec.
2nd: Grace Thek, 4hrs, 16min, 3sec.
3rd: Rebecca Clarke, 4hrs, 19min, 3sec.