It’s all very well heading off to the Canaries for a couple of weeks of rain-free training during the winter months, but if like me you’re blessed with ginger hair and don’t have the bank account or sponsorship deals of a Kardashian, you might have to look a bit closer to home. A lot closer to home. Actually just look at your home – behold the perfect training weekend venue!

Last weekend I transformed my tiny flat in north London into Club La Banter to host an Ironman training weekend for two athletes. I was one of the aforementioned athletes, Katie was the other. If you’d like to hold your own Club La Banter, here’s a few tips.

Pick your training partner wisely

At my training camp, the only appropriate response to the phrase ‘Go hard or go home’ is ‘Go away’. I believe in beer over burpees and sitting down to sit-ups. You need a training partner who is training for a similar event to you and has a similar training ideology. Katie has been similarly foolish to me in entering an iron-distance triathlon this summer and she likes proper beer. Sold!

Create an event-specific activity schedule

We’re training for ironman triathlons. This means our weekend’s activities needed to include the staples of swimming, cycling and running plus a bit of practice in the third and fourth disciplines, namely getting changed a lot and celebrating with beer. We began our weekend at Cyclebeat for a hill specific spin class (because we’ve both chosen notoriously hilly iron-distance triathlons) followed by a dip in the London Fields Lido and on Saturday a 10K race in Regent’s Park.

Incorporate some training tourism into your weekend

You may be training, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a holiday. Treat your guests to some of the cultural highlights your venue has to offer. For me this involved walking across a rainy London Bridge pointing at buildings: ‘There’s St Pauls. There’s Tower bridge. That’s the Gerkin. That’s somewhere I used to work.’ I was hardly Declan from Coachtrip but luckily I had laid on a visit to a brewery for some beer sampling/hydrating.

Nutrition is important too

If you’ve picked your training partner wisely, they’ll have brought along ‘those heath muffins’ for you to eat between activities. Whether you offer full-board or self-catered accommodation is up to you. I opted to provide bed and breakfast and took my guest to a local pub and curryhouse the night before our 10k race. Some may look on this as foolish but the wise know this to be an essential training technique (invented by me). Fear of toilet troubles at your big event can be eased by knowing that you once ran a 10k with a stomach full of chana masala and IPA.

The Oxfordshire branch of Club La Banter opens this spring and my host promises “We’ll ride our bike outdoors and swim inside next time.”