Athena slow when called from step function

I have an athena query that runs in around 3 secs both from console and even is called using pyathena. I have added the query execution into a step function as I need to perform some pre and post process. When executed into the step function the query task takes 50 seconds ... I am lost. Any suggestion?

My step function task looks like:

{
  "Type": "Task",
  "Resource": "arn:aws:states:::athena:startQueryExecution.sync",
  "Parameters": {
    "QueryExecutionContext": {
      "Catalog": "AwsDataCatalog"
    },
    "QueryString.$": "$.responseBody.sql",
    "WorkGroup": "*****",
    "ResultConfiguration": {
      "OutputLocation": "s3://******"
    }
  },
  "TimeoutSeconds": 900,
  "ResultPath": "$.responseBody",
  "Next": "presign_url"
}