with my friends, so I thought that a step up in training would be fairly straightforward: keep running, remind myself how to swim, learn to cycle in cleats. Boom. Win race, achieve well-deserved glory and go to the World Championships in Auckland. Ahem

in the process would have been the crowning glory for the brickie’s son from Llanelli. But recent results have relegated it to the ‘cherry on the cake’. This final race of the year ends a 14-month golden period that has established him as one of the world

last year?I was confident I would do well. Leading up to it I did everything pretty much right. It was just one of those things that I had to get right on the day, and the 10,000m showed that you can be favourite and still not quite do it [Farah

you are not burning it off as fast.”Even nutritionists sometimes struggle with the concept. “Maintaining weight after a long race season can be hard for a triathlete,” says Suffredin. When he was training for an Ironman towards the end of last season