I started training for my 750m swim leg with a dangerous level of confidence. I had weekly swimming lessons throughout my childhood, topped off with lifesaving training (mostly swimming around in pyjamas staging elaborate 'rescues' of my clubmates). The legacy of this is that I h...
Hello! Welcome to my Cyprus International 4-day Challenge blog. The Challenge is a stage race held in the Akamas peninsula of Cyprus, taking in four very different races - and I'll be blogging throughout.My runningI've been running for about four years and have actually taken on ...
Not an awful lot to report on the swimming front - I'm putting in the lengths, trying to count them without losing track (which seems to be much more difficult than it should) and trying to make those constant little improvements to my efficiency in the water.I swim in two pools ...
I love training schedules - not so much dragging myself out of bed and doing the training, but the schedule itself. Deliberating over which RW plan to use. Putting it into a calendar template. Fiddling about with it in Excel. Lovingly picking out the colour-coding (does purple sa...
In one of many perks of my job, I was recently lucky enough to be offered private coaching with GB swim coach Ben Titley at Speedo HQ. Speedo UK's inner sanctum is tucked away in a quiet London suburb, and comes complete with swimming facilities we can only dream of at TW Towers....
Waking up when it was still dark on Sunday morning, with screaming leg muscles and buses to the start leaving at 6.45am sharp, the prospect of taking on another race seemed impossibly cruel. But one thing spurred me on: the smug knowledge that by the time the UK was waking up I'd...
After a couple of days of lying around on a sunlouger by the pool (very pleasant) and dwelling on the races ahead (not so pleasant) the wheels finally began to grind into motion. Yesterday was a busy day - by the standards of the life of luxury I've rapidly become accustomed to -...
First thing to say about the 11K Hill Run, is that it's hard. Really hard. Almost entirely uphill, most of that steep, entirely on rocky trails in the Cypriot heat. And a final steep climb into the village for the final kilometre felt especially cruel.Last time I ran the Challeng...
Grinning like a loon while bounding down twisting trails, the sea in the distance growing ever closer, I realised - there it was. My running mojo. It was BACK!The half-marathon starts a bit like the 11K hill run - pale, dusty, rocky trails. But thanks to a start at 300m rather th...
The lovely people at Speedo were kind enough to give me a wetsuit for my moment of swimming glory. It is a thing of beauty - it even has fin bits on the arms and pleasing stretches of gold neoprene.But swimming in it took a bit of getting used to. First of all there was the ten-m...
