It’s now almost 2 months since Ironman Cozumel, and things have moved on swiftly. I probably over did the recovery period, and that combined with too much festive cheer meant my weight shot up and my mileage dropped dramatically. By the end of December I was aware that my focus had slipped and I was …
Continue reading Marathon Des Sables: Multi-Day Training Camp – Part One
It’s been a month since I’ve posted, I have no excuses other than I just haven’t felt the desire to sit down and write. This doesn’t reflect that things have gone bad, nor that I’ve lost motivation, actually its more to do with the fact that I have been training hard (and even working hard), …
Continue reading Training for Ironman Cozumel – its coming together.
It’s now been a month since returning to Japan, and my 7 month sojourn in UK and Spain seems a distant memory. I’ve got back to some sort of routine, although things are far from normal, with many offices and shops being closed and a state of emergency in place, meaning restrictions on what you …
As mentioned in my previous blog, the past week was my first week back in Japan, and it’s really good to get home after unexpectedly being away for so long. When I first touched down I was required to spend 3 nights in a quarantine hotel, officially not allowed to leave my room until the …
Good morning from hot and humid Tokyo. I have just started into my second week of self-isolation here having already spent 3 days in mandatory hotel quarantine on my return to Japan, before being allowed out to isolate at home. The Japanese government have cracked down hard on people entering the country, with a maximum …
Continue reading Happy to be back in the land of The Rising Sun
I wasn’t planning on writing anything this week due to having NLR surgery (natural lens replacement, which is basic cataract surgery but using prescription replacement lenses), however as I am feeling pretty chipper and positive, thought I would get a brief update down.Firstly – wow, I can see!! I was first prescribed glasses in elementary …
Another quiet week passes by, really nothing exciting or out of the ordinary to update anyone on. Living in such an isolated way as I am now, without any real interaction with the outside world, tends to be what one may loosely term as “boring as hell”, however it is conducive to great training. The …
Continue reading Sleep deprivation, Normatec and Bionic Eyes
This week's post is a little late, and somewhat truncated. I actually have no idea where my time went, but seems I’ve been too busy/tired/lazy to get anything done, and now it's already halfway through the next week. Time is weird like that, I’m lucky that I don’t need to work a normal 9-6, I’m …
As of April 12th, England opened up a little and while many were celebrating being able to go to the shops, get their hair done or go out for a drink and a meal, for me the big change was that the pools would open. Since December last year my only chance to swim had …
The big news for the UK this week was the death of the Duke of Edinburgh. I am a bit of a Royalist, although not at all nationalistic having spent so much of the last 40 years out for the country, so I do find it sad to witness the passing of an era. He …
In the summer of 2013, I started a running streak that lasted all the way until March 2017, a total of 1302 consecutive days, only brought to a halt by the need for an operation. During the streak I had set a PB in the marathon of 3:36 and in the half marathon of 1:35, …
As a kid I never really enjoyed participating in sports, I was a bit of a klutz, not being particularly gifted with any physical skills other than some endurance. This endurance did favour me when it came to long distance running, and I was briefly in the school cross country team, however I was always …
Since making the financial and mental commitment to race in 2021, Marathon des Sables has been taking up much of my time and energy, constantly on my mind and driving me to become rather one track in my conversations. It’s terrifying and exciting, but I have become more and more committed to doing it now, …
I know once I make this challenge fully public, I will have more reason to make sure I succeed, so after weeks of prevaricating and rewriting, I dumped the previous blog attempt and I sat down to write and publish a totally new piece as quickly as I could. Apologies for the bad English, grammar …
On Saturday it became official, the Desaru 70.3, scheduled for 21 April in Malaysia, joined a constantly growing list of M-dot sanctioned races that have been cancelled or postponed. This was supposed to have been my first race of this year, and would have been my first race since June of last year (my planned …
I have to be honest and admit that last week was pretty much a failure as far as swim, bike and run goes, when an unexpected disruption meant both training volume and focus dropped considerably, as well as causing an increase in bad food and bad habits to creep back into my life. There was …
Boring Warning, If you don’t like training by numbers, please scroll on by! It’s been a fun few weeks, trying to finalize goals for 2020 and then building the training plans to reach them. A couple of weeks ago I was fairly sure I knew what I was doing, but continued to have a nagging …
Continue reading The Miracle of MAF (and the need for blind faith)
The continuing problems with my Achilles and the resulting inability to properly train, created serious doubts regarding my level of fitness. Therefore I had reluctantly decided that, rather than risk further injury, I had better drop out of the local Half Ironman race scheduled for 1st September. Of course every cloud has a silver lining, …
In my previous post, written in early July, I was feeling confident about my upcoming races, having got some good bike work in and looking forward to some structured and intense run training, something I had not managed last year. I surmised that by having the opportunity to follow a full training plan that my …
Oops! This should have been posted over a month ago in early July, but I got distracted as was traveling across countries, continents and the space time continuum. Anyway, found it sat in my pending file, so will post now. It’s somewhat out of date, but still relevant !! Summer has now definitely arrived, and …
Time to Tri Harder 