Long time no blog

So I am currently sat on a plane from Madrid heading home after an amazing long weekend, more on that later though. I realise that it has been a long time since my last blog, about 9 months and a lot has happened in that 9 months culminating in this weekend.

So to start with, shortly after my last blog I got my new bike from Giant Leamington Spa. I am now racing on an amazingly fast Giant Trinity. This bike is also my first taste of di2, having ridden a tt bike before without di2 it is a revelation.  Being able to change gear wherever your hands are means no more awkward gear changing or riding in the wrong gear. It also give you a satisfying click followed by an electronic whirr each time you change gear. So a big thanks to all the guys there for sorting it out for me, especially Billy for giving me the opportunity to ride in the shops colours on such an amazing bike.

With my new bike all raring to go I decided to enter the Bedford Autodrome sprint duathlon.  As my swim training had not really gone according to plan, apparently you have to actually get in the water, I decided to see how I did without the swim bit. The duathlon was a qualification race for the European Sprint Duathlon Championships and so the level of competition was going to be high, but I figured that since it was the 2 disciplines I was strongest at it should play to my strengths more.

On the day of the race the weather got worse the closer I got to the venue, by the time I parked up it was heavy rain which didn't look like it was going anywhere. Undeterred I proceeded to registration and signed in before getting my transition area set up.  The race started slightly early rather than keep everyone in the rain at the start line which I think was a decision everyone was happy with.  On the first run I found myself towards the front, although quite some way behind the leaders, it was hard to force myself to keep to my own pace and not try and keep up with them. Due to the race being on a race circuit there wasn't much in the way of hills and even less in the way of drainage so with all the rain we were getting there was a lot of standing water and spray from anyone you decided to run behind.  If I thought the run was hard though the bike was another thing entirely.  It was my first experience of carbon break tracks in the rain and by far the worst conditions I had ridden my Giant Trinity in so there were a few moments where my heart was in my mouth and I was treated to a very steep learning curve. I was not surprised when I found out after the race that my last lap was my fastest as I had started to adapt to the conditions.  The second run went well and I managed to overcome a few people who had passed me on the bike, even producing an effort inside the last few hundred metres to get a gap on a couple of people I had been running with.

It turned out that I had come 32nd and narrowly missed out on a qualification place by a matter of seconds. However it did mean I was first in line should a roll down place become available.  In November I received the email I had been hoping I would get, it was from British triathlon telling me I had a place in team GB at the European Sprint duathlon championships in Soria in April 2017. Realising that I had on my just scraped through I knew that I was going to need to up my training to get to the level I wanted go be at in April.

The winter was spent implementing a training programme aimed at the race in Soria.  This involved me spending a lot of time at Nuffield health Warwick working on my core and doing strength work as well as the normal cardio sessions I do.  I think this method of winter training definitely paid off, initially I was struggling a bit with speed when I started to reduce the strength training in favour of speed work about a month before Soria.  After a couple of weeks though I was really seeing the benefit of it.  I have already set a new 5k pb this year and am not far off new pbs on the bike despite it being so early in the year and the weather having been so crap so far.

So with everything falling into place ahead of Soria I decided to do a local triathlon the week before as a warm up and an opportunity to practice transitions under race conditions.  I went into the race with no expectations as I had done no swim training all year, it was just an opportunity to get some race practice in.  As an indication as to where my focus lay I didn't even look at my time when I got out of the water, it was straight to transition which was going well until my number belt unclipped itself as I was putting it on.  I allowed myself a smile as I clipped it back realising that this was not something I was going to have to worry about happening in Soria.  The bike section went well and I was soon back in transition where a speed bump just after the dismount line almost caused me to hit the deck as I tried to manoeuvre myself and my bike over it at speed.  Luckily I managed to stay upright and otherwise had another smooth transition.  The run was meant to be 5 1km laps although I realised after 1 lap that the laps were longer than 1km but was feeling good so carried on at the same pace regardless.  The support on the run was great as there were quite a few people I knew doing the event so we all had our own support crews that were cheering everyone on.  I finished 3rd overall which was amazing as I hadn't expected to be competitive at all due to my lack of swim training.

This meant I headed of to Soria feeling really good about things.  Due to this already being a pretty long blog though you are going to have to wait until the next one to find out about Soria though.  I promise it will only be a few days though as it is already partly done.