THE GOOD BUCK

As it was my day off today I thought I’d treat myself to a day in the Lakes, trying out that Trihard, so called ‘UK’s toughest triathlon’.   The thing is, all of the challenges I’ve set myself I’ve had a reasonable level of fitness to start with, and a huge dollop of bloody-minded determination. Basically, set my mind to it and got the job done however beastly the ordeal. Such as my first long bike ride. Set off, knocked off 51 miles (‘cos I got lost, otherwise would have done the 56 miles that is the half I.M. distance) then did a half marathon run straight after it. It was hellish, but I just got on with it and did it. Such was my expectation for this little adventure; maybe half kill me, but just battle through.   A few minor set backs to start with. Such as it being in the Yorkshire Dales, not Cumbria. Way into the Dales. Two bleeding  hours of foot down! Then I couldn’t find the start point. Grrrr. Got it sorted eventually.   I looked out of the car, it was a 1 in 4 ascent to start. 25% hill. Challenging. It was so long, as well as steep, that I ended up pushing my bike up a bit of it. Beaten at the first hurdle. I was stunned (as well as shagged!) but carried on. A few miles later it did it again. 25% hill. This time it went on for several miles. I ended up stood on the pedals in first gear on the lower front ring, tacking across the road from one side to the other trying to keep the momentum going. I failed again. The one good thing about bloody Yorkshire, as I saw anyway, was there was hardly any traffic on the roads. I got to the top of that hill/ mountain range and I looked like this;     Which is not just knackered, it’s shell-shocked! I’d ascended from the level of the river, here;   Up roads like this;   I was sorely (I choose my words advisedly) tempted to turn around and go home. I couldn’t face the prospect of going down the other side then having to come up it again. It had cost me quarter of a tank of petrol (£12.50 –ish) to get there, same to get home so I pushed on. I was beginning to concede defeat, but thought I’d better get the full measure of the course and myself whilst I was there. One thing I did learn, for this race I will be taking my tri bars off. You are either heaving at the normal handlebars going uphill, or hanging off the brakes trying not to crash, going down.   What do you know, when I got to the point I realised was going to be my furthest extent, I had to climb right back up again! By the time I had got to the last 3 miles I […]

I’m still on about my triathlon. Run away, run away now. I am still working up to the full Iron Man distance Outlaw race (July 24, provisionally) but I have found a few diverting projects besides.   In may (21st, to be confirmed) there is a half I.M. distance race in Cornwall. That really appeals! Quick swim around St Michael’s Mount, (1.1 miles) tootle to Lands End and back on the pushbike (56 miles) then a half marathon run (13.1 miles). Even the swim won’t be on a level surface!  So enthused am I, that I’ve talked Wendy into taking a weeks holiday down there. I would like to make it two, but she won’t leave the cat for that long!     That could be me! Also, as a cheap warm-down to the season I’ve just booked a small but taxing triathlon in the lake District. It’s the 14th of August. 1800 metre swim in Semer Water, 42 miles of pure hell hills around the Lakes, lots of 1:4 hills, then a leisurely 12 miles up and over the hills. It has been rated as the toughest (for it’s distance, presumably) triathlon in the U.K. In a rush of blood to the head I’ve gone and entered that! I was going to build up my stamina at cycling and see if I was up to it, but I just went on the home site, Trihard (love the name!) and one of May 2011 events is already sold out. I panicked and signed up. Shit, I’ve got some training on now! 42 miles of Lake District hills! There’s incentive for you! My training has been a bit patchy. I did a quick 30 (hilly) miles to test out my tri-bars. They are not as life-threateningly weird as I’d been lead to believe. Did a 10 mile run just to keep my hand in. Today I got a surprise half day off work so I had a nap then went to the pool. I started off, determined to crack the four strokes/ breath, without lifting my head. Still not ideal but improving. The thing I’ve learned is; don’t blow all your air out as soon as you submerge your head again, hold it until the third stroke, blow it out, then breath on the fourth. It stops that horrible panicky feeling that you have to breath RIGHT NOW, that causes you to gasp in water. Anyway, I thought I’d try and learn as I trained, so set out to do 100 lengths. Succeeded, carried on to 150. That’s 150 x 20m, or 3k. My rough maths told me (2/3rds of a Kilometre to a mile) that that was 2 miles. Damn you Johnny Frenchman! It’s 1609 metres to a mile, ie 11 lengths short. I could have been a contender! Anyway, that disappointment aside, I was thoroughly pleased with that. Less than a month ago I was taking my first swim in 15 years, and was delighted to do 10 lengths, head […]

Things are progressing apace. Unnervingly some things are actually looking like they are coming together. Always a sign you don’t understand the awful truth of the situation, in my experience. I went away to my jolly hols at the T.A. gulag. I was all psyched up for it. They’d said ‘this is where it gets serious’ at the end of the last course, so I was thinking of basic training. Being beasted from pre-dawn until stupid o’clock in the morning, mad infantry shit out in the field,being freezing, soaking, pissed off, morale destroyed barely functioning automatons. Not so much. Weapons drill, and lots of it. No screaming, a bit of speed marching, locker layout and room inspections (basic army stuff to maintain discipline and promote cleanliness and hygiene) one night, then one day and a night in the field. Not getting bugged out (where they wait for you to get settled in your sleeping bag beneath your hastily erected sheet then simulate an enemy attack so all hell breaks loose. Awful.) If anything I’d have to say it was too easy. The ten days were ruined for our intake by an ex-reg (former regular army soldier) thinking he was still a corporal in the bad old days of bullying  newbies. The fact that it was a a five foot young lad and an eighteen year old girl he was threatening did nothing to endear him to the troop. Anyhow, the corporals were all over that and he will be watched very carefully from here on in. Still, it left a sour taste in the mouth. Cracked that then. Though with hardly any PT. I took my brand new trainers away with me thinking they would get broken in by lots of little runs. Nada. And we were expressly forbidden to do our own training in the (many, many) hours we had off at night. Apparently the fluffy new model army has the training specifically tailored to take civvies to soldiers, any further individual input would bugger it all up!   So, my fitness took a bit of a dive whilst I was away. Came back on the Friday, Sunday morning I was doing the Holmfirth 15. A fifteen mile road race around (you guessed it) Holmfirth. Which is near Huddersfield. The smart people would perhaps have thought to check the terrain before upping their mileage. Never having been accused of being smart I did not. Thought, “it’s only an extra 1.8 miles more than I’ve already done, how hard can it be?” So very, very hard. It was not so much a road run as speed mountaineering. Mountain goats were tumbling past me. And my trainers (brand new, you’ll recall) were too tight, grinding the bones together in my right foot. It started really hurting at about three and a half miles. Not a good sign. Ten miles later the pain was so bad I just had to stop. I loosened my trainer right off, to the point I thought […]

I have set my heart on my new challenge, the Iron Man (IM) triathlon. An aspiration that,  I might add, has earned me little but ridicule in most circles. The exception being the Runners World forum from the Warrington half marathon. Those chaps were again very supportive and have provided me with a list of generic IM distance triathlons. Of these, the one I like the look of is the Nottingham ‘Outlaw’ triathlon. Same thing; 2.4 miles swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run, but £179 (last year, tbc this) as opposed to £325 for the brand name IM. I’m going for it. I went the baths, did my first swim in fifteen years. At first I was struggling with two lengths of a 20m pool. Got my rhythm and managed ten lengths. The pool geezer, Ged, was watching me. As I got out he had a word. Said that he’d been watching me and that it was taking me, head-up, 27-32 strokes to do a length. He said my fitness wasn’t in question, but my technique was rubbish. He said he had proper triathletes who, with proper head-down swimming could do a length in 13 strokes. He has taken it upon himself to teach me! Cool. Freebie lessons! So I tried. Face in the water,blow, stroke,blow, stroke,blow, stroke,turn head, breath in a gallon of water, flounder drowning. Repeat. And again. Two sessions of an hour each, still couldn’t get more than a few strokes without running out of air or breathing in water. I was beginning to think I was going to have to give up and swim it all head-up. I went for a longer session on my day off, and finally cracked it! Huzzah! I can manage three lengths now before I run out of air.Obviously not getting sufficient air still, but it’s a start.  The  other good news is the money. I was looking at all the local baths, they all wanted over a fiver a session in the pool, and for lessons it would have been £22 a month, being on shifts I would only have been able to go to two a month, so £11 a lesson. The pools were only open 7- 8.45 am then in the evening, so useless for 2-10 shift. Then I stumbled across a local baths owned by the parish council. Open 12-4, £2.30 a session and I’m getting free lessons!  Serendipitous score! Now I’ve started to get the breathing Ged is teaching me proper strokes, to be efficient and fast in the water. So it’s a backward step on my overall distance in the swimming, but a proper starting point from which I should be able to really improve.   The other thing I said I wanted to try was a distance ride, followed by an endurance run. I wanted to get a benchmark time and test my fitness. The baths weren’t open early Saturday, so I just went for the 56 miles bike ride and the […]

That was a Black Sabbath quote, btw. Ozzy Osbourne? 70’s rock legend? *sighs at the yoof of today’s want of culture.* Anyhow, Iron Man; I finished my first half-marathon on Sunday. It was epic! It lashed down the whole time, parts of the course were flooded, others (due to the bloody hills they managed to find in Warrington) were more like streams. I seemed to be labouring up stream for thirteen miles. By the end of it I felt like a salmon on its spawning run. Parts looked like this;   Lo-res, but you get the picture, as it were.   So, cracked the half marathon, in 1:43:38. Not too shabby for a 44 year old unfit duffer’s first attempt. Two days later, convinced that I was now a top athlete, I set out for an hour’s run. I had decided to do better, so was after knocking a minute a mile off my time. Not even! My legs were done-in for the first mile, had to force them to work, got into a ‘quick’ pace, then flagged almost immediately! Ended up running 4.5 miles(in 30 odd minutes)! By the time I’d finished my legs felt like they were made of wood. I did knock 20 seconds per mile off though, so not all bad. Then I started thinking that I needed something more challenging. Thirteen miles! Ha! Then I stumbled across Iron Man. An endurance triathlon. You swim 2.4 miles, on to a pushbike for 112 miles, then finish it off with a full (26.2 miles) marathon run. Obviously that in itself is a bit too easy, so they have time limits for each section, and stage it around the hills of Bolton to give you a bit of a workout. As soon as I saw it I realized that was it; my new challenge. I have given a name to my mid-life crisis, I call it Iron Man! There are a few obstacles,  such as being a crap swimmer. I have never been competent, and don’t think in my swimming ‘prime’ I could complete two lengths. 2.4 miles equates to 154.4 lengths of a (25 metre) pool! Nor have I actually been for a swim in about 15 years. Then there’s the push-biking. OK, I can ride to work and back (which is 11 miles when worked out accurately) but 112 miles, after a swim, at race pace, around the hills of Bolton is a different kettle of fish. The half-to-full marathon step up is said to be easier than the 10k to half, but even so it’s quite challenging.   The thing is; as soon as I started considering it I got a buzz of nervous excitement. As Mal said in ‘Firefly’  (the series that preceded the epic film ‘Serenity’) “We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty”. That’s how I feel. It’s next to impossible, the challenge would be heroic, but if you succeed…., that would be mighty, indeed!   The thing I don’t […]