Having had what was without a doubt the busiest January of my entire life, I can finally say the journey to Mallorca has begun. A combination of work and play (a balance that’s hard enough to grasp without throwing in training!) has meant that the majority of this years training has been high intensity, strength and core. While that’s not enough to reach my goals come May, I have felt that its kept me at a decent level of fitness to build from… maybe?

Today marked the first race of the year (last weekend was a write off) and the usual thought processes of ‘can I be bothered’ and ‘its bloody freezing and I don’t even have a wetsuit’ (don’t ask!) were flying around my head. If I had to pick one thing that I took away with me last June, id have to say a set of solid mental balls. Yes, the fundraising was huge and will always be the real achievement, but on a personal level, whenever I’m finding something tough, either personal or at work, I just remind myself of one thing…. “you’re a f***ing ironman”! So far that’s always managed to do the trick 🙂

Ok so back to the race. Once I pulled myself from my bed at 4.30am and overflowed my car with petrol half asleep whilst filling it up at the station (they don’t do it for you before 6am – how rude!), I made my way to the venue. All I could think of was how cold it was and not having a wetsuit was really playing on my mind. This feeling that was amplified when I was literally the only person apart from 2 kids in the junior race going skins! “if they can do it then I can surely?” was my immediate reaction followed closely by… F**K!

A quick 1km run to warm me up followed by 40 Burpees/40 Squats just before the race started meant I was nice and warm and prepared for the plunge.  Suddenly… Ooosh I was in, and all that drama for 2 and half hours prior to that moment suddenly became a waste of time. Yes it was cold but id somehow managed to forget I live in the middle east and cold here is close to a heatwave in the UK. Ironman my arse!

This was my first swim of 2014 and I was fairly happy with how I felt but know there is a lot of work to do. Technique and strength have gone since Nice so pool 

sessions are top priority now for sure. Out the water and on the bike I was excited to see how i’d do having done a lot of speed work since Xmas. This definitely showed as on a pretty windy day I still managed to average 34km which I was happy with. Off the bike and into the run I was as comfortable as I’ve ever been, hitting a decent pace and feeling really good from start to finish. I don’t know officially but I’m pretty sure it was a negative split 5k* which was another positive.

With an extra 4km added to the bike and an 800m swim I managed to clock a time of 1.20.04 which, considering the month I’ve just had, I was more than happy with. The race didn’t really tell me much I didn’t already know and now its about kicking on from here and building for the Olympic at Tri Yas on the 28th.

Its great to see the updates coming in from the rest of the squad (my favourite still by far is Tony: Sore ankle) and hopefully we can continue to build a picture of everyone’s journey to Mallorca. Its crazy to see how far we’ve come from a few loose emails and drunk conversations but that’s what its all about!

Have a good weekend and those of you that are training… train hard!

Cheers