Around November two thousand and nine I had an epiphany, I was fed up and overweight. I made a decision to become as fit as I have ever been in my life, this led to a revised diet and a training regime that had me in the gym two hours a day, five days a week.
Within four months I had lost six stone in weight and it seemed like a good idea to sign up for the triathlon that my good friend Estelle was trying to convince me to do. I set about improving my swimming cycling and running with this in mind, in April I entered the first Nike Grid and in the twenty four hours available ran until I couldn't walk. This proved to be rather unhelpful with my running and I discovered I could no longer run faster than eight kilometers an hour without my knees hurting. Stupid is as Stupid does. over the next few months I gradually eased back into running, concentrating mainly on my cycling and swimming.
In mid July I decided to take my bicycle and ride to Dover to see my sister and managed to get lost, covering around one hundred and seventy kilometers, this I later discovered was only ten kilometers or so off the Ironman cycle distance, giving me my first inkling that I would possibly like to attempt an Ironman.
Two weeks later I was in Hyde Park with a last minute ticket purchase from gumtree, courtesy of an injured athlete who could not compete, I figured that it would be the best way to find out what the transitions were really like, I had already been completing the full sprint distances one after the other in training every other weekend for around two months and felt that I needed to experience it all without changing room gaps.
I finished in the bottom third, not bad really, two weeks later I finished in the top third at the London excel sprint, despite having made an almighty mess of my race nutrition and as a result I battled with cramp in my legs from five hundred meters into the swim, through the cycle stage until two and half kilometers from the finish.
In October Nike began advertising the Grid number two, I registered and checked out the rules, this time there were teams, and fifteen days in which to kill yourself. I decided that as I didn't have a team I would post my brief race strategy on the facebook page and ask if anyone was looking for extra team members. I was invited to join Team Audiofuel and accepted, we had a crazy two weeks and the outcome was that as a team we finished second out of three hundred and twenty teams and I personally finished fifth out of three thousand two hundred odd runners on points, running one hundred and forty seven kilometers in twelve days.
Alas this again resulted in an injury, prior to the Grid I had been running twenty kilometers a week spread over three or four runs and I pushed too hard to fast, I am now weaning my injury back to a decent level and preparing for Janathon, exercise everyday and then blog about it, I was concerned that I wouldn't get the hang of the blogging, but it appears that I am quite capable of producing vast amounts of text about myself, Janathon here we come.
