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The first thing is work. I asked, in a rambling, apologetic way if, when possible, I could have shorter runs. I was flustered because it felt so cheeky. I asked for longer runs last year, I didn’t want to them to think I was getting all precious and picking and choosing my runs. I was thinking straight Didcot and back, 10½- 11 hours. In a case of ‘careful what you wish for’, I got a week of 7-9 hour runs. 45 minutes overtime in the whole week. It’s normally about 8 or 9 hours, easy. That is what I asked for, but not what I meant. The next week was back to Didcot runs. That was a mite disturbing. On the bright side it has given me time to train, which is what I desperately needed. I’ve joined Warrington Triathlon Club with a view to sorting my swim out. I can thrash out the distance, but I’m shit slow. I was supposed to be going to for my first class last Saturday (at Lymm) but I woke up with a shitty headache that just got worse all day. By 16.30 (class time) I’d gone back to bed to try and sleep it off. This time! Got to overcome my odd reluctance and actually attend. If I can do that tomorrow, I’m going to enter the Chester Middle (half Iron) Distance triathlon as a warm up for the main event. It’s local, relatively cheap, and about right for my training. The only reason I’ve not already entered is it’s a river swim (1.2 miles) and my swimming is too weak to fight a current. If I can go tomorrow, then enter the Chester Half, that will give me further motivation. I want a good swim in the Outlaw. It’s been bastard freezing. They are predicting 10 days of sub zero from Wednesday, so I’ve not been out cycling. I’ve been on my turbo and going hard at the gym on the bikes, then onto the treadmill for fast runs. Because of the training write-off last Saturday I didn’t do my long (15.5 miles) run.  I got up early on Sunday and went for a run before work. I set off slowly to avoid injury, then decided as I didn’t have a lot of time to make it a pace run. I have been building fitness and distance, trying not to push the speed, for fear of injury. I battered it! (By current standards.) My running has been 8.30 m/m for a bit, dropping to 9 m/m. I averaged about 8.08m/m, with 2 miles under 8 (on a 10 mile run, forgot to say). They say to never do two hard runs back to back. If you went fast or long, small and gentle the next day. I went to gym, did the bike for half an hour to warm up, then on to the treadmill. I’d developed a belief that in doing that, warming my legs up, I would avoid injury. […]

Training. Everything revolves around training. Can I get a training session in before work? Can I get enough sleep to go for an early swim? Am I coming down with a cold that will set my training back? Am I getting shin splints that will totally bugger my marathon training? I’m very tired a lot of the time. Yesterday for instance. I missed the swim on Tuesday (it’s lane swim Tuesday and Thursday, 07.00- 09.00) due to a 13 hour shift, so yesterday I had to get up after 6½ hours kip, go for a swim (just 54 lengths. 64 lengths to a mile, so just keeping my hand in.) Then straight up to the gym, 30 minutes on the exercise bike (hilly setting) then 10K (6.2 mile) run on the tready. Then charge home, changed, shove some food down my neck and straight out to work for an 11½ hour shift. I was feeling pretty miffed, to be honest. I was even thinking about quitting driving and going back to order picking, briefly. Driving is great if all you are thinking about is the money. The long hours mean shift premiums and overtime rates. Loadsa money. To do the job you gradually develop a laid back attitude. It takes as long as it takes and I’m paid by the hour. 14 hour shift? Ker-ching! The second you introduce another priority it suddenly becomes a bind. Instead of taking as it comes you get frustrated when the job takes so long. That single 13 hour shift cost me two days training. I thought it was going to be a long run so I didn’t want to knacker myself before starting a long shift. Then, by the time I got to bed I didn’t have enough time to sleep and train before starting my next shift.   I was thinking of other jobs for which I’m qualified… Order picking Asda … and that’s it. Even if I was to go order picking at our place I’d need to do an extra 10- 15 hours a week to get to my current hours. They do the overtime in 4 hour blocks, so I couldn’t do 5 x 10 hour shifts. So say 3 x12. That’s still 3 days a week I couldn’t train. And at least £100 a week pay cut. For a nice, short, 8 x5, 40 hour week, I’d probably be £250 a week worse off. Not a viable option.   Last year in a quiet spell I was only getting 7 and 9 hour days so I asked in the office for long runs. My first course of action is to see if I can change back again. This start time tends towards the longer runs, meaning longer hours, so if that’s not possible my next course is to look into changing my start time. I’m fine with my usual run, which is just Didcot (just past Oxford) and back. That is about 10½ hours. Ideally I’d like a […]

Last week I was saying it was just the swim I need to worry about. Hmmm. Good news and bad. The good news is I bought a clicky ring lap counter. You wear it like a ring and click it every length (otherwise you quickly lose count.) After my first swim in 4 years, when I was quietly pleased to complete 40 lengths (two thirds of a mile) I thought I’d up it to 50 lengths this time. I forgot I was only clicking every time I got back to the shallow end. I was getting changed into my gym bunny kit when I suddenly realised, “hang on, that’s 100 laps!”  A bit over one and a half miles! On my second swim!  Well pleased with that. The not so good news is I’ve had to cut right back on the running. I’ve been getting warning pains up the side of my shins. Not bad, but enough that I’m scared of getting a proper injury. Instead I did a two mile run on the treadmill (after the 100 length swim and 25 minutes on the gym pushbike.) Rather than irritating the injury I’ve been beasting myself on the turbo trainer. 3x hour+ long sessions this week. That is some graft!  Also, thanks to me losing my sense of taste last March, and this training, I’ve gone from a jammy doughnut shy of 12 stones, to 10½ stones. So that is great. Less weight means less effort to drag my lardarse around the Outlaw.    More exciting news is I’ve been forced to go on a spending spree. Bought a new Ironman GPS watch. 12 hours of GPS battery. So, once you get out of the swim and transition (not GPS), you’ve got 12 hours of battery (enough to finish the race) to tell you how you are doing and how much further you have to suffer. Amongst the features that attracted me to it (other than that it’s designed for Iron distance tri’s, obviously) is that you can choose how many lines of information to display on each screen. This means, if you choose just one line, you get a big, clearly visible, display. I’m getting to the stage where reading glasses are no longer an option but a necessity, making my old watch illegible.   Also I’m totally moving the turbo trainer to the shed. I sweat so much I have to clean up puddles off the mat when I’m finished. This is not making for a pleasant house smell. The thing with that is, I’ve currently got it facing my PC to take my mind off my misery as I train. So I started shopping for a refurbished laptop. The online opinion is that refurbs are a pig in a poke though.  In the end I’ve got a cheap, new, Chromebook. A laptop built on a Google platform and down to a budget. After ages spent reading the reviews of what I can get for my money I […]

I got that turbo trainer for us. It’s proving to be completely impractical to try and get Wendy’s bike on it. Which is a bugger. The idea is you take your back wheel off and mount the bike on the turbo, running your chain on to a gear cassette (cogs) mounted directly on the turbo. Like this Which is all good and well. Until you come to try to mount Wendy’s bike. Apparently the modern fancy-pants gear cassettes (as on mine) fit each cog individually onto spines on the spindle, and need a special thin chain to fit the cogs, because they in turn  have to be so thin so they can get 11 cogs on the back wheel. Wendy had a go on the turbo with my bike and a lowered seat. She lasted about 2, maybe 3, minutes. That was a shitload of cash well spent. I gave it a try out. After a few minutes your legs are burning. I set myself a target of 20 minutes for my first go as I was in a rush to get to work. It was hellish. And that was in a low gear. Today I upped it to an hour. I was sat in just a pair of shorts and my clip-on shoes, window open, freezing day, sweat pouring off my whole body. Hence the towel and that strip from seat post to handlebars. Seems sweat is corrosive on the bike. It is non-stop burn. It’s like you are going up hill constantly. There is no let up, no flat bits, no coasting. An hour of solid pushing. I was moaning about riding in to work nearly killing me when I first got the bike, someone on twitter said “Spin to win!”. (Spin classes being the name of group sessions of people doing turbo. Seen them at the gym.) He may well be on to something. If I can build up my time on the turbo, and put it through the gears, I am going to batter my bike time at the Outlaw. Usually I just grind out loads of tedious long rides and gradually improve. With this I’m pushing it the whole time. I’ve joined the gym again, like a proper January Gym Bunny. Primarily for the swim sessions, but I’ve got a new pair of trainers so I can do small bricks. Possibly do an hour swim, half hour ride, half hour run. Getting your legs used to switching from one discipline to the next is half the battle. I’m going to give it another 2 weeks to build up some slight fitness, then join Warrington Tri Club. They hold an hour’s tutored swim lesson every Saturday afternoon, which is my day off. If I can get swim training and turbo the crap out of my legs I reckon I’m well on for a personal best this year. Which is quite the ambition in seven months, from scratch. (Day after. Saturday.) Feeling good about my training. Last […]

I’ve been eating humble pie for breakfast, dinner and tea since I started training. I used to scorn low gear wobblers, put it in top gear and pedal you lazy bastards! When I started training for my first Outlaw, on my first day, I did a 51 mile ride and a 13 mile run. A lifetime of bans and motorbike write-offs meant I had cycled everywhere for years.I thought that level of fitness was normal. So people who were making hard work of it needed to pull their finger out and do a bit. Oh the humility. I’ve found a decent route into work, it’s 9.1 mile each way. And it’s been battering me. I’ve only ridden in 2 days but I am ridiculously far away from ‘hop on and ride 51 miles’. I took the car in to a body repair shop to have the wing fitted, pushbike in boot to ride home, and the mechanic was a tri guy. He took one look at my bike and told me to look at bike set-up tutorials on YouTube. I did. Seems I had it all set up wrong. I’ll try this, see if it’s any better. I’m so unfit I’m not even doing a long run on the bike. I’m going to give it a month of riding to work to build up some semblance of fitness then start.   The “die tri-ing” thing was a bit of a moment. I was having persistent chest pains, smack over my heart. It wasn’t bad, that level of pain anywhere else wouldn’t have warranted a mention, but being there you have to worry. I was steering clear of ibuprofen as it has recently been linked to heart attacks. I Googled it to see if I should worry. “Survival rate outside of hospitals, 6%”. OK, that’s not ideal. Warren Lang (school friend) said one of his RAF chaps had died of a heart attack whilst training for an Iron tri. One of the security guards at work, who looked fine, has just dropped dead of one. I carried on training but was going to go to the doctor if it hadn’t cleared by Friday. Then on Thursday morning I was awoken by shooting pains in my left arm and pins and needles. I really thought I was going to die, right then. I was not a happy bunny. It scared me. I was all “I don’t want to not be!” I took a moment, “Can’t avoid it. At least I have been.” I decided to concentrate on the dying bit and not worry about the rest. I didn’t die, by the way. In case you were worried. I hit Google again in the morning. “26 causes of chest pain that are not a heart attack.” I had a read through, tons of stuff. The bit I took from it was “you can tear chest muscles from just a coughing fit… If, after taking anti-inflammatory drugs, the pain persists…” I took some ibuprofen. […]