On my biggest Ironman training weekend last year, I left the lido having swam 3km for the first time. My friend Josie took a photo of me jumping in the air ecstatic. It wasn’t just because I’d swam further than I’d ever swum before but because I’d just read an email that said that Tricurious, the book that Katie King and I had been talking to a publisher about, was actually going to happen.

That email changed our summer.

Writing a book has proved a lot like preparing for a race. If you want to make it happen, you have to do the work. We spent months writing, reading each others work and rewriting. Just like training for a race, it’s also a good idea to have a good friend on hand when you’re writing a book.

Katie guided me through my journey from novice triathlete who couldn’t swim to going for my first open water swim and she was there that day in Bolton. I’ve been lucky to have her help me though it all and answer my many questions. And that’s what we wanted Tricurious to be like – a good friend helping you find your way through the sometimes confusing world of triathlon and sharing a few jokes with you along the way.

Tricurious is out in March (you can pre-order it now if you wish). In it, Katie provides a lot of practical knowledge about the sport of triathlon and I share my experience of navigating my first two years as a triathlete. Katie and I share the same philosophy when it comes the sport, namely that it should be fun.

We also share the same sense of humour and hardly a day goes by without a email or text from one of us to the other trying to elicit a giggle. We don’t take ourselves or the sport too seriously, but that’s not to say we don’t give it our full effort.

I hope that our enjoyment of swimming, biking and running comes across in the book, that our jokes make a few people laugh and that we convince a few people to give triathlon a go.