Not enough hours in the day

As well as showing you just how gross the human body can make itself look after 26.2 miles of running, how many ways it's possible to hurt and how fast it's possible to consume that post-race meal, marathon training can teach you another valuable lesson.

In the first few weeks of marathon training the main panic is along the lines of "How many runs a week? Plus strength training, and cross training too? And you expect me to stretch after a run? Have they invented two more days in the week that nobody has told me about?"

Over the coming weeks things drop off your schedule - like personal hygiene or sleeping or remembering to collect your kids from school (luckily I don't have any of these). Maybe really important things like watching two hours of Fraser re-runs every night or updating your Facebook status every half hour drop off too.

But generally you muddle your way through and find ingenious ways to squeeze in your training. I now can't brush my teeth without doing one-legged squats for example.


Recently I read a blog by pianist James Rhodes entitled 'Find what you love and let it kill you' in reference to a Charles Bukowski quote. Rhodes writes that after we account for all the essential things we have to spend our day doing "We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want.

"Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke?"


He urges us to, instead, spend that time pursuing whatever it is that you want to become - an artist, a writer, anything, but something. A marathon runner? An iron man? To spend you time chasing down things that will leave you saying 'I did that' instead of 'I wish I'd done that'.

If you're spending a lot of time on Facecrack or Witter, you might like to give this a try and turn everything off for a week.

Last month, I sent those who subscribed to my Autumn Marathon emailer last year, a time audit sheet. The idea is that you record what you spend your time doing for a whole week and then you look at where you can spend less time doing some things and more time doing other things.

Training for a triathlon has left me with very little time to do important stuff like sit in beer gardens or wash up. I'm sure there's a few hours in the week that I'm overlooking. I'm keen to find them.

Race report: Nice Tri Sprint Triathlon St Neots

It's 5:30am on a Sunday morning. I've got a number scrawled on my hand and a bad feeling in my stomach. It's just like the good old days. Except I'm getting up instead of going to bed and the number on my hand is only three digits long. 282, my number for my first ever triathlon.

At 8:10 I lower myself into the Great Ouse river. My hands are cold but the rest of my body is warm enough. The water is 12C, another important number. Half a degree lower and our swim would have been shortened to 400m. I'm not sure which situation I'd prefer. A horn sounds and my wave of 57 women start swimming.

Despite my fear of the swim I'd stayed calm and not nervous in the day and hours before. I let the pack head off before starting to swim and I stayed close to the bank. Too close. After about 50 meters I got weeds in my mouth. This threw me - this doesn't happen down Kentish Town pool. I pulled them out and tried to carry on swimming but my stroke was all wonky and wrong.

My mum, dad and friend Helen were walking along the bank next to me cheering me on. I thought how concerned they must be that it didn't look like it was going terribly well. My dad would be considering taking off his shoes and rolling up his trouser legs ready to leap in and save me.

I was still too close to the bank and my hands were getting caught in the weeds as I tried to pull through the water, but I was worried about going deeper. Soon I would have no choice. The turnaround buoy appeared faster than it should have thanks to the outward swim being with the flow of the river. I crossed over and hoped.

In the deeper water my stroke got better. I was swimming slightly lopsided as I was breathing on one side and not rolling my hips fully, but it looked more like swimming than splashing. My confidence grew and I even passed another swimmer. One of the canoe club who were patrolling the swim pulled another swimmer out of the water, but I carried on.

Despite almost swimming into a boat parked at the side, the upstream swim went better. If I'd managed to swim in a straight line, I might even have looked like I knew what I was doing. I approached the last buoy and swam into (literally) a man from the wave ahead. 10 more meters and it was over - two hands helped pull me up the bank and I staggered towards transition.

The transition area was empty and I was a bit delirious from the swim - maybe it was the cold or the exhaustion or the delight at having survived. I pulled off my wetsuit in a PB time, put my bike kit on and headed towards the bike course.

Helen had driven me round the 14 mile (slightly longer than standard sprint) bike course the day before which had helped me familiarise myself with where I had to turn left. This was lucky because by the time I got on my bike there was nobody around to follow. After a mile the guy I'd overtaken on the swim came zooming past me on his bike. I was eating my Snickers bar at the time.

I pedaled fast but with nobody around to get competitive with I had to just do my own thing and try to keep the tempo up. My legs moaned but the countryside roads were nice, I cycled past fields of oil seed rape, saw a hare hopping across a field and a snowy owl circled overhead. It was a route that wanted me to slow down and enjoy it, not tear through it.

With a third of the course to go another woman overtook me. I tried to keep her in sight but she lost me on a couple of the small hills. Then as we turned back to the town I saw another woman ahead of me and I made it my goal to overtake her before the bike was complete. I passed her with a few hundred meters to go only for her to run off out of transition before me.

The run was the part of the race I was looking forward to and the bit that I could legitimately call a 'race'. But it didn't go to plan. My feet were numb from getting cold in the river and not warming up on the bike. I overtook the woman I'd just passed on the bike. There were more people ahead of me but the run was a two-lap course so I couldn't tell if they were on their first or second lap. I ran passed them all the same and pressed on wanting it to be over.

Breathing wise I was fine and I didn't get the lungs in mouth feeling that's usual on a 5k, but my legs felt like lead.As I headed out for the second lap of the park there was nobody left to pass. I counted down in my head to the finish and crossed the line.

I'd started the race with three goals: don't drown on the swim, don't fall off the bike and complete it. No time goal had been on the list and I hadn't even worn a watch. I wanted to do the 5k in under 25 minutes, and as a rough estimate I thought the bike would take around 1:10 - but as I don't cycle at top speed, only commuting to and from work, it was difficult to judge.

I printed out my results and was very pleased with the number that popped up - 1:54:52.
Swim: 24:36, Bike: 1:01:58, Run: 22:58.

Facing my triathlon fears

In the theatre world they have a saying: Bad dress rehersal, good opening night. For a while I was taking solace in this saying, reassuring myself that my triathlon 'opening night' would go without a hitch. But there's been no dress rehersal, I've broken all the rules about trying all your kit before race day and haven't even taken the pricetag off my onesie yet.

I've dragged my wetsuited self down to a lake twice now. While it quelled my fears that I'm going to sink to the bottom of the river without trace on Sunday, it hardly filled me with confidence. I swam in a pool last night for 750 meters - the same distance I'll need to swim on Sunday. My lane at the pool was occupied by me and one other swimmer and, quite frankly, that was one too many for my liking.

Come 8:15 on Sunday morning it's likely that my lane will be occupied by around 100 other swimmers. Elbows and feet will be flailing in all directions and this is what I worry most about. I don't worry about my own swimming - I could slowly complete the course by myself without getting into difficulty, but I worry about the other people. That someone else will panic and grab hold of me. That an elbow to the face will knock off my goggles and make be panic. That a kick to the chest will leave me winded and unable to swim.

Fear can be a good thing. It can give you the extra adrenaline you need on race day. But it is my biggest threat when I'm swimming. The anxiousness I feel makes my chest tighten and my breathing hurried - two things that aren't useful at any time, let alone when you're trying to swim in a straight line and not take a lung-full of water.

I read a quote on twitter this morning, someone describing their triathlon race strategy: "Survive the swim then race like hell." It sums up my feelings about the swim quite neatly. Though I'm counting the bike as the 'race' part and the 5k run as more of a victory lap if I manage to make it through the previous stages unscathed.

I've joked a lot about being worried about the swim, but it's no exaggeration to saw it really does scare me. But as I lower myself into the water on Sunday, I'll be thinking of Chrissie Wellington and the promise I made to her. I'll also remind myself that however badly my triathlon debut goes, it won't go as badly as Chrissie's - her wetsuit filled with water and left her unable to swim at all. That really was a bad opening night.

How to win the London Marathon (at 400m)

On the Sunday of the London Marathon I cheered from the sidelines for a few hours then went home and watched the recorded coverage. At the men's start some chancer flew off the start line to try and beat all the elite men. I laughed, not knowing that that chancer was someone I knew from hash running and who I had shouted 'Go on Dave' as he'd passed me at the 24 mile point.

He'd set himself the challenge to lead the field at 400m all in the name of raising money for charity, which is no mean feat. First he had to run a quick marathon time in order to get close enough to the start line to be able to catch the elites. But it was all part of a bigger challenge. I'll let Dave explain...

"I have been volunteering with the charity Street Child and decided to run the Sierra Leone Marathon in May to raise money for them. I'm never going to be content with just running a race though, so I set out the six challenges.

"Challenge 2 was to run the London marathon and be winning the entire race at the 400 meter point. It took some positioning and going flat out to catch Mo Farah, who was averaging 71 seconds per 400m and I started downfield."

Here's a video from Dave's headcam. You can read more about his race on his blog.

Open water swimming at Bray Lake

"The lake is open but likely to be a bit choppy. It'll be fine but just to warn you - good race practice!" came the text message on Thursday morning. I checked the weather forecast for the evening - 22mph winds and some rain.

This was weather meant for staying indoors, lighting a fire and having a dog curl up on your lap. As I don't have a fire or a dog, I had no excuse not to put on a wetsuit and jump in a lake.

Picture by K

This was only my second proper open water swim. K had offered to take me open water swimming when I first voiced my intention to become a triathlete. I had to learn to swim first. But on Thursday with panic building about my first sprint tri in less than 10 days and the fact that I had to swim 750 meters in a river scaring the life out of me, I took her up on it.

The guys down at Bray Lake weren't deterred by the weather. There was a friendly community feel to the lake - people were swimming together in groups and telling us 'It's not so bad once you're in it.'

They handed me a brightly coloured swim hat and pointed us in the direction of the lake. A lake where two hardy souls were swimming about in just their trunks. Everyone else was zipped up tightly in a wetsuit - there was none of the odd-one-out embarrassment I'd experienced on Monday.

This time, calmly talked through it all by K, who I considered my own personal lifesaver and cheerleader, I was in the water and face down (in a good way) quicker than last time. We swam a 400m loop while the wind picked up the water and smacked it in our faces every time we lifted them to breath.

The last 50 meters of the loop was headfirst into the wind. I had to stop every 10 meters to catch my breath but K assured me I was 'doing great'. I made it back to the start but left K to swim a second lap by herself while I watched on from the deck.

As I sat there another pair of women approached the ladder. One said to the other: "I can't believe it's so windy for your first open water swim. Honestly it's not usually like this. If you can swim in this though, you can swim in anything."

I watched K glide round the lake. My first time there had been less than ideal but I can imagine on a calm day when the sun is out, swimming round it is pretty fun. I think I'm going to like this open water swimming business. And I think I'm ready for my triathlon.

Thanks to K for guiding me through this triathlon lark. And thanks to Bray Lake for giving me a season swim pass.

Swimming in the Hampstead Ponds

The last time I went swimming in open water was in a river in Cambodia. I learnt an important swimming lesson that day: keep your mouth shut. I spent the following day sat on a chair half way between my bed and a shared bathroom unsure which way to go.

Yesterday, as panic began to build about my forthcoming triathlon debut it was time to face my fears and head to some open water. Since my dip in Cambodia I’ve done something surprisingly sensible and learnt to swim properly. Apparently doggy paddle isn’t the experienced triathletes stroke of choice.

Despite my improved swimming skills, on sharing my concerns about just how badly my sprint tri is going to go with a friend, their response was: “You’ll probably be really rubbish at it. But at least it will be funny.” Funny for who though?

Me and the same friend headed to the swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath yesterday where the chalk board said the water was a crisp 13C but my toes said otherwise. I had a wetsuit, my companion did not – who’s laughing now?

There were lots of people stood around the water daring each other to jump in, threatening to push each other in and dipping a foot in before staring at the water and each other some more. I wriggled into my wetsuit and felt like the only person at a party that’s turned up in fancy dress. I hadn’t got the last minute text that the Batman theme had been cancelled.

Turing up to swim in a wetsuit is rather like turning up to a bowling alley with your own ball or going ice skating with your own skates. It sets a certain level of expectation among those watching that you’re going to know what you’re doing. The pressure to get a strike or skate backwards was on as I headed towards the water when all I was trying to do was avoid a verruca or wart.

I put my feet in. It was cold. Swimmers wearing a small piece of lycra swam past. I had to get in. The initial coldness of the water on my feet didn’t go away like it does in the pool, the only way to warm them up was to get in and start moving.

I lowered my legs in, then my body and pushed away from the step. My body didn’t feel cold, the wetsuit kept me warm and, more importantly for this scared swimmer, made me float. I bobbed about in the water for a while wondering if I could get a cocktail and just float here all afternoon.

The lifeguard had asked that I keep to the back of the swimming area as I was in a wetsuit so I rolled onto my stomach ready to swim up there. I put my face into the water and gasped, trying to take in a lungfull of pond water. Breathing was proving difficult so I ambled my way through the water with my face up. It took another 10 minutes before I could put my face down and do something my swim coach might recognise – but then I couldn’t see where I was going and was swam in big curves.

After 20 minutes I gave up and headed, in a zig-zag- fashion, back to the steps. I’m now confident that I won’t drown in a river in Cambridgeshire in two weeks’ time – my wetsuit will see to that. But I’m probably going to be last. Hopefully I’ll find it funny.

Thanks to Xterra UK for having faith that this novice triathlete won’t completely embarrass the brand and providing my Vector Pro X3 wetsuit for the season.