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 …
Category: Training
A sad farewell, a jab and some progress
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 …
Building Strength
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, …
Born again Noob
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 …
And so it begins – training for MdS #week1
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, …
The Toughest Footrace on Earth
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 …
So where do we go from here?
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 …
Favero Assioma Uno Powermeter Pedals
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 …
The Miracle of MAF (and the need for blind faith)
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)
My Private Training Camp
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, …
