Raising the Bar.....

Those of you who know me, know that I don't like to do things by halves, I seem to have to prove something to myself, it's almost like I am daring myself to fail, or achieve the unachieveable. 

I entered a half ironman before I'd even done a triathlon,  I entered an 8 hour Mountain Bike enduro only 2 months after taking up the sport, I did an Ironman because I thought I probably could , Ran 70km during a 24 hour run relay for fun, so when I got to last christmas I had no real plans in place for this year. Ironman was fine and all, I didn't do as well as I'd liked, and everyone seems to be doing them now, the novelty just wasn't there, it's a bit fashionable..... I needed to find something more challenging, more extraordinary.... the guys felt the same, so one drunken night, Me, Quiz, Partl and Barton all found ourselves signing up for Nokia coast 2 coast adventure race - 107 miles across the scottish highlands. Kayaking, biking and running. I'd never kayaked but I surely couldn't be any worse at that than I am at swimming right?

There was a choice of a leisurely 2 days to do the race or 13 hours... so obviously we signed up for the one day effort.... September is 9 months away... plenty of time... "who's for more rum?"

A few weeks later Gary my friend  from the North East mentioned a great looking event, and due to my frame of mind, I entered us both for this too, it was to be in August - so would be good timing for c2c. The event is called “Tour de l’Ain” a four day etape de cyclo sportive in the French Alps like a mini tour de France. It looked exceptionally tough containing several moutain passes varying from category 4 all the way to Hors category  including Le Grande Colombier (approx 10km long and ascending 1300m) right at the end of the event.

So for the first few months of the year, most of my training revolved around getting lots of road biking in, doing the odd sportive, and then entering the Pendragon Sportives as "training" (two days, 21,000ft, 220 miles) which is know as the Welsh Etape, which provided me with the best road riding I've ever done. Simply superb!

I did no running for months and seemed to have forgotten that I had something of 21 mile off road miles largely uphill to contend with pretty soon.... but still I ambled around with a bike between my legs and my fingers in my ears.... "la la la la la....."