No training ....

France holiday week 1. Returned from Cornwall after vegging out from the Sprint Tri, packed the car and off to the Alps. 1 Espace, 1 roof box, 5 bikes, 3 kids, 1 wife and me. Amazing what you can attach to a car nowadays.

2 days later, much shouting at the kids and we arrived in the Les Get. Straight into the Lake for a bit of open water swim training (200m), a tad cold but OK. Same old problem with swimming though, I need to practice more.

Out with the bikes. Mine is a classy 15 year old £99.00 steel mountain bike with tag along for Sophie. (not a desirable machine) and awful hard to make move. But Sophie likes it, sitting at the back, singing songs.

Next was running at altitude training. So I ran the final incline up to Ranfoilly (400yards at 1800m) and I was 'puffed out'. Was it the mountain Crocs I ran in, or the altitude.

Then down to Lac Leman and I saw a 'Dorking Ten' tee shirt!!! 150m Sprint training after lunch, the running Crocs absolutely helped me beat Oliver over this distance, although he did take off faster than me. Biked around (tagging Sophie, in 1st gear to keep the cadence up, just to make it difficult), then we all jumped into an open air swimming pool. 50m pool and I knocked out 500m, feel good to have done this.

**** I am a Triathlete ****

I am a triathlete. Sunday 8am and I lined up with 153 others in Hayle pool, Cornwall, a locked in tidal pool, 19 degrees C. My strategy was to 1, lurk at the back. 2, don't die. 3, swim in the right direction. Here I am, lurking at the back so that I don't get kicked and staying close to a canoe for safety. The horn went and the swim started. Head down, water not too cold to breathe, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, breathe ......... Hey, I'm still alive, hey this is good. Quick where are the bubbles to follow? Head up, look about, ahhhh, I'm heading in the wrong direction! Quick back on track. Stroke, stroke, breathe ...... Put my head up again. Ummm, everyone seems to be ahead of me! Who is behind me? Whats that, what its all the breast-strokers behind me. Ohhhhh no, I'm swimming with the breast-strokers! I must get in more swim practice. Finally I too had swum 750m. Here I am coming out. Awesome I look like I might know what I'm doing, notice the breast-sroker still in the water behind me.


Onto transition (T1). Run out of the water, undoing wetsuit, (stagger out of water on wobbly legs, fiddling with zip), strip off wetsuit, (how hard can a wetsuit be to take off? Get off my ankles will you, when did someone glue this thing to my ankles?), put helmet on, (who twisted the straps around?), unrake bike, (easy) run out of transition, (owww my feet on the stones), jump on bike, feet in shoes, and cycle. (feet in shoes, go on feet, in you get, why does the shoe not stop turning around? ohhh quick pedal before you fall off, right do up the binding, arghhhh, next time I put the shoes on the feet first.



And I'm off, 20km on the bike, swig the juice and crack on and please, please don't let anyone on a mountain bike overtake me. The bike went quite well, I did overtake a number of people, including 2 people with aerobars. Coming back into Hayle was all down hill, definately would have been good to have aerobars here. This is me coming into T2. Notice feet still in shoes! Thats because I can't get the shoe fastenings undone. Notice 50yds to go before I need to get off. What am I going to do, get my feet out or fall off? I went for the unclip and run in the shoes option. Racked the bike ahead of the woman ahead of me in the picture, then had to take my helmet amd shoes off, and put my trainers on. The woman was off out of T2 before I had my trainers on. Note to self - Elasticated laces, enough said.


Heres me starting the 5km run. The last leg, 5km run, ohhh I've left my garmin on the handlebars, dohhh. How hard can a 5km run be? Well about as hard as the final 5km of a marathon. 'Come on legs, forwards, back, forwards, back. No, no, not round and round, that was the last leg'. Notice in the picture my pre-race strategy of 'no socks', that was a mistake. Within 200 metres I had rubbed a hole in my left ankle.

5km later and I crossed the finish line. I am a triathlete.

Here's the statistics:

Swim (inc T1) 19:48
Bike (inc T2) 43:19
Run 25:09
Total 1:28:18
Place 105 (153 total)

As the song says: 'Things can only get better', and that means swimming more, building some cycling leg muscles and brick sessions.

Return to Winterfold Hill

Conquered!

Yeah, a 21% hill after about 35km. bottom gear and push those pedals down and pull them up. I feel chuffed. Then onwards, last week I failed to get up Winterfold hill and failed to complete the route I set out on. Onwards from Winterfold hill are more hills. Winterfold is the most severe but the others are not easy either. St Martha's Hilll, Coombe Bottom Hill are both tough hills. By the time you get to Dunley hill you could easily loose the will to live, but in comparison Boxhill does not seem so bad.

One more week to go. Aug 5th is my first triathlon. A sprint so there should not be too many problems. But against all advise I have not done an open water swim. I know, I should have done at least one swim and I am now starting to think I have made a mistake. In fact I am worried about actually getting in the water to start with. Cornish water is cold. In the middle of summer it is still cold, even with a wetsuit on, it is cold and I have a reputation for running away from cold water! So I am pretty nervous about actually starting the swim!

Daniel comes for a run

For a couple of weeks now, Daniel has been asking if he can come for a run. Was it me that inspired him, or was it the school athletics day and all his mates running. I believe its his mates, but I might just like to think I helped a little bit.

So we went for a run in a break in the rain. We drove to the Viewpoint carpark and set off from there to a place I call the secret viewpoint. Its just over a mile through the woods and brings you out at another viewpoint looking north and west. Dan and I had a great run there and back. The tracks were wet and squidgey, ohhhh it must be summer! But we did not mind that, we ran and chatted and dodged puddles.

Well done Daniel, 'You ARE a runner'.

Sunday and I decided to follow a 81km route that takes in the major hills in the area. Is this wise? Ummmm, I don't know. Now I have always had a problem with those red triangle signs showing the hill coming up, they mean nothing to me. I couldn't tell you if 10% is steep or not or if 10% is steeper than 20%. I have no clue about them. So today when I saw on the map 21% it meant nothing. Nothing until I tried to cycle up it! Now I know that 21% means your heartrate goes up over 160bpm, that your speed drops to 1 mph, that your legs burn, it means that I have met my match. Winterfold hill. I kept going until I had to stop. I tried to get going again but fell off whilst trying to clip in, so I walked to a flat section, got going and caved again 70m from the top. What a nightmare hill. I continued on with the route until I got to Chilworth, then turned for Albury and the A25 to Dorking and up Boxhill again for 81.5km in total.

Ohhh, yeah .... and I got wolf whistled at! Ha, it was before Winterfold 'the destroyer' hill, made me laugh, must be the 'leotard', I mean cycling gear.

Swim, Bike and Run

Tuesday night I ran 5miles around Boxhill, Wednesday night I did the Masters Swim session and Friday I biked 18miles. Not a bad set for the week.

On Sunday I did the Elmbridge 10km. An great race on a flat course. I had previously done 46:30 here and I did have ambitions of setting a new personal best. But having not kept up my momentum after the London Marathon this was not going to happen. So on Sunday I managed a time of 47:12 I am dissappointed with this time, but 'if you don't put the training in, you don't get the performance'. Looking at my split times, I did the first 5km in 22:52, this was all road and I am happy about this time, don't think I could do 5km any quicker. The second 5km was on the Thames towpath and took 24:23. If I had kept up the training I believe I could have knocked 1 minute off that time.

Looking forwards, I now have 3 weeks until the Hayle Sprint Tri. This will be a new experience for me and I am still scared about the swim. The biking and running should be OK, I have easily done these before, just never swum 750m without stopping before, how long should it take? Time for some internet research.

An improvement

Last week I started to pick things up again. Ran 20km and Swam once. The weekend was taken over by Daniels birthday party, and Thursday was Daniels Athletics Tournament evening. Daniel ran a leg of the relay and helped the team win. He was so excited to be running, he could hardly keep his excitement in, so when he started to run, he exploded away down the track. Well done Daniel. After this event he asked if he could go out running with me sometime. So maybe, just maybe he is 'inspired', theres that word. The one I have been waiting to say. Daniel has asked a few times in the past about going out running, and we have done a couple of 3-5km runs. But I think this Athletics event, being with his friends running and mabe a little of seeing me training has inspired him a little. So we are going out for a run on Saturday.

This week I have run again, 8km Tuesday night. The calves are painful, but I think its getting easier. Not quite upto the 11km circuit yet, but improving.

Saturday we went to the Tour de France Prologue in London. First time I have ever been to something like this. The streets were all blocked off and the cyclings stormed through, amazing. It was quite difficult to see them, being 2 or 3 deep at the railing meant you had a field of vision of about 6 foot, which is about 0.1 of a second for a cycling to go past!

How long is it?

How long is it since I last did a run? That was the question I asked myself as I tried to do a 8 mile circuit on Friday evening, and finding myself run-walking up the zig zag. Ohhhh, no and I have a 10km run on July 15th. I need to get a plan back together becasue its all going horribly wrong at the moment.

Last week was a swim and a run week. Not very good and basically shows you need to have a schedule to follow. Have a goal, a race, an event you want to do and work back from it. Create a plan showing what your going to do each week. Then go do it. Have I done this? No, and thats why I am loosing that endurance and fitness built up earlier in the year.