Coming up to two years of writing this blog I have surprised myself a bit that I am still going. I initially started at the beginning of last year as a way of helping me track my progress and to motivate myself through the Chile Challenge and it served its purpose pretty well, giving me a way of sharing various training and race pictures, and somewhere to dump those random thoughts you accumulate during long sessions.
At the end of last year I thought about closing it down: after all the challenge was complete, the sponsorship money collected, and my body well and truly knackered! But then something else came up which would make 2015 even bigger than before – Ironman!
So at the end of the year I am still here, and have a few more achievements ticked off the list, and a few more medals on the shelf. First up was the Tewkesbury Sprint Triathlon (1.31.16), an indoor swim and beautiful bike course, slightly let down by a run around a commercial park, but still a decent way to start the season (and a nice mug at the end to celebrate!)
My other big race was of course Ironman Staffs (7.17.12), a fantastic event from start to finish, with the most amazing feeling crossing the finish line. It really was a great weekend, maybe even once in a lifetime, but one all triathletes should experience at some stage in their career.
It was not all swim-bike-run though, as this year also marked my first ever obstacle race – the Colour Obstacle Rush in Sheffield – wit my wife and various other family and friends. I have no idea what the time was as my old GPS died part way through, possibly asphyxiated by powered paint, but this was never about how quickly you could complete it; in fact at times we actually slowed down to make the experience last longer as we traversed bouncy castle mazes and half-heartedly dodged each others paint grenades!
Aside from racing, I managed to really ‘get into’ fitness classes, something I had actually been doing for a while, but this was different. Along with my wife, who became equally obsessed, we started going to 3, 4 and even 5 classes per week, including RPM, Body Attack, Combat, Pump to name but a few. The culmination was our trip to Manchester for the One Live event which involved 6 different classes in a 9 hour or so day, the closest I have got to triathlon endurance indoors!
After all that, what do we have to look forward to in 2016? Well the big race is already booked in the calendar, the Isoman. More on this to follow, but let’s start by saying it begins with a 3.5 mile swim which is really going to push those boundaries… The obstacle races will also continue, with the Colour Rush back in the diary, a new Rough Runner race to kick the season off, and on the indoor side there will be plenty of new classes to look forward to.
So I guess that returns me to my first question of whether to continue writing this blog, and with all this to look forward to the answer is going to have to be yes!
Chile Challenge 