WARRNAMBOOL runner Ella Gill made it a hat-trick of Surf ‘T’ Surf wins yesterday.
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Gill, 24, won the women’s 10-kilometre race. “The pressure is on now,” she said.
Gill clocked in 37.01, edging out Buninyong’s Angela Williams (38.13) and Collingwood’s Julie McNamara (39.37).
The trio finished in the same order in 2011.
“I am really happy. I beat my PB by about one minute and 23 seconds,” Gill said.
“It was probably a little bit easier than last year because we had the tailwind coming home and I went harder on all the downhills and tried to get a gap a bit earlier.
“I had a few people saying they couldn’t see the girl at the back but still you don’t always trust what people say so I was still looking behind every minute or so because I didn’t want to get passed on the line.
“Since I had been leading nearly the whole way I didn’t want to lose it at the end.”
Gill and partner Kris McCartney, who was third in the men’s 10-kilometre run, train together.
“The course goes past our house as well, so we have a bit of motivation to start the course at our place and finish at our place,” she said.
“I did a few times doing like a hard minute and a two minutes easy and another time I’d do it two minutes hard and one minute easy the whole way around.
“It is hard when you go past our place because it’s the six-kilometre mark and you always want to stop. When you run past here it’s like ‘I could just sit on the couch’.”
Mountain to Surf in Lorne and Bells Beach Bash are Gill’s next challenges.
“Normally I do Rip to River, which would have been a week ago, but it’s a bit too close to this race,” she said. “I gave that one up this year to focus on this one. I wanted to win.”