The ITU Dextro Energy Hyde Park Triathlon crept up on me. No sooner had I started training than I found myself in the grand stand at Hyde Park watching Helen Jenkins romp home to victory, a few hours before the relay teams would set off.This was my

and not many people will ever have that experience. To compete at a home Olympics is even more rare and I think the public will really get behind the events and make them special.What tips do you have for people competing in the Hyde Park triathlon?It's a good

four months of hard training for my stint as a Runner's World pacer. But the route I ran on this fateful Thursday is fraught with traffic lights, tourists, school kids and an astonishing amount of other runners. So the last relay leg of the Hyde Park

means I've piled on the weight and am embarrassingly unfit. I'm hoping that the Hyde Park race will be the impetus for me to kickstart my fitness routine and ditch the extra stone I'm carrying. If nothing else, I've seen how competitive James is, and he

poor man's John Wayne.Scroll forward to late spring 2011, when Team TW decided to take on the Hyde Park Triathlon. After working on the Triathlete's World website for a year, I knew that I could no longer blame cycling itself for my irrational hatred

in August (750m at the Hyde Park Triathlon Relay with the rest of Team TW, then 1500m at the Marlow Swim)- Two 10Ks in July- An autumn half-marathon (I am dithering between Bristol, Cardiff and Birmingham - advice appreciated!)- The epic Cyprus International

it to nature's cruel elements, I knew I had to take it outside. We're ideally placed at TW Towers to train on the race route itself. With Hyde Park less than a mile away, I've got no excuse not to be ripping up the Royal Park's paths in my lunch hour

it somewhere in the region of 21 minutes. It actually was slightly over, but I allowed for stopping in traffic and dodging umbrellas. So that's a full minute off my target time, with a little under 4 weeks of training time to go until the Hyde Park Triathlon

are common with increased speed training (some tips on avoiding injuries here). I'll get into the different individual sessions we did in a later post, but the evidence was clear. Speedwork was improving my times dramatically.In the lead up to Hyde Park I

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 ...