THE GOOD BUCK

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 […]

On the Sunday night, after my weekend of jolly T.A. training, I posted a throw-away remark on Twitter saying I was finding it hard to get my head back into civvy mode. This has attracted a few wry comments. Allow me to explain. What I wasn’t saying was that 48hrs of T.A. training had turned me into John Rambo, a steely eyed loner unable to adjust to civilian life. That would probably take a whole week. No, I was just saying that it is a totally different mindset. I am a Liberal by nature and politics. I rarely get myself in a state of apoplectic rage and self righteous indignation because I can usually see the other chaps point of view and often will argue it out of contrariness.   With the exception of religion. That is a whole other blog entry. Many other blog entries. I could dedicate my life to writing nothing but the arguments against religion and still have spleen to vent before I died.   As I was saying, my default state is one of laissez faire. There are things that wind me up, but I can’t see them as absolutes.   BNP for example. Easy to say they are a bunch of racist morons who should be sterilized, if not shot, for the common good. (Tempted to leave that train of thought right there.) But,….the thing is, I can see what made them like that. They feel disempowered, marginalised and afraid. They are probably not burdened with an excess of education, so can’t get the good jobs. They retreat into the solidarity of an exclusive white only world, and invent myths of a white only Britannia where scum-of-the-earth morons, who happen to be white, lived like kings. The answer then is better education, more integration, better understanding of diversity (and maybe sterilization and shooting, let’s not take that off the table as an option!).   So that’s my civvy state. I reason. I empathize. I wring my hands and clutch my pearls.   Then there’s the army.   I had forgotten. It is not a job. It is a life. Let us not forget that I have already done three years and one war in the regular army. It is weird. I compared it on Twitter to a dream/ awake state. Both states seem real at the time, yet are inconceivable in the opposite state. It really is like that. For me, at least. I was indoctrinated into army life at an impressionable age, and in a vulnerable period of my life. The lessons learned remain. Twenty years of being a civvy, all the freedoms you take for granted, work just being a job that you leave in your locker when you clock off. All forgotten in an instant. SLAP, and you’re awake. You live army, you think army, you are army.   The Captain who took us for one of our lectures was saying about that Daily Mirror story, where a ‘prisoner’ was shown […]