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By SCOTT PURKS Tribune correspondent

Published: November 11, 2007

Updated: 11/10/2007 11:24 pm

CLEARWATER - Andy Potts said he felt, "out of sorts in the water," and Mirinda Carfrae said she, "froze on the bike and the run," which goes to show some folks aren't as bad off as they sound.

Consider: After swimming 1.2 miles, biking 56 miles and running 13.1 miles around Cleawater Beach on Saturday, Potts finished ahead of 1,500 of the world's best athletes to win the Ironman 70.3 World Championship in 3 hours, 42 minutes, 33 seconds. Carfrae, meanwhile, not only won, but she finished in a world-record time of 4:07.25.

"Hey," said Carfrae, who broke the record of Natascha Badmann by almost a minute, "I'm Australian. I'm used to hot, hot, hot."

Maybe now she'll consider running more races in 50-60 degree weather, with the emphasis on "run," which she said, "was probably the best I've ever had in my life." Carfrae covered the final 13.1 miles in 1:18.40, almost 2 minutes faster than the run of second-place finisher and defending 70.3 world champion Samantha McGlone, who ultimately finished more than 4 minutes behind Carfrae.

Potts, a 30-year-old American, didn't have such luxury, having to hold off a furious charge by 36-year-old Oscar Galindez, who didn't give up the lead until 100 yards remained and finished only 15 yards behind Potts.

"I held the inside on the last turn and then just put it down," Potts said. "I felt pretty strong at that point, but I knew Oscar wasn't giving up. When I finally pulled up to him in the run after trailing by more than a minute for more than seven miles, he didn't let me pull away. He put up a great, great fight. Man, it was a great race."

But not so much in the beginning as the sun raised bright yellow and blared in the swimmers' faces.

"I would look up for a yellow buoy, yellow buoy, but I couldn't find it," Potts said. "The sun was sending all these reflections and I was weaving around out there. Who knows how much time I lost?"

He still came out first from the swim (his strongest event) and trudged ahead to the bike, where he held fairly close to the lead, but came off in a secondary pack of three, behind four others, including Galindez.

"I was feeling good," said Galindez, a triathlon legend in Brazil. "The legs were churning, churning and everything was good."

Until about a mile was left in the run. That's when he struggled with some residual pain he suffered from a road-rash training crash off his bike two weeks ago, an accident that forced him to miss almost a week of training.

"My left side went a little numb," Galindez said. "But I make no excuses. Andy is so, so strong. He has these longs legs and he is tough to beat down the stretch."

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