Hometown Unicorn

Let's get this blog back on the road.  Since I last posted (sounds confessional...don't worry), a bunch of stuff has happened, and continues to....   Two more Ironman distance races ( Outlaw 2014 and 2016), a job change or two and some great football experiences.   People always say this, but expect more regularity in the future :) A word about work, which sucks most of the time out of my life, so needs a mention. I am now working for a hybris System integrator PortalTech Reply .   We have a large project with an orange-coloured UK airline, developing a commercial system for the airline that involves a lot of integration with proprietary and COTS software they have.  It's a fascinating problem domain for an IT architect, plus I am getting my hands dirty with the technology as well.   Also I am working in central London (Victoria) most days a week, which is interesting in a way, although it's a bit of a building site at the moment. Sports and fitness ev...

Last weekend I attended a Total Immersion swimming course at a school in Hampton. I had a brilliant experience (the only way to describe it) and it has transformed my way of thinking about the sport, to the extent that l now want to completely re-engineer my stroke. This morning I started out on this journey, by spending an hour just doing basic drills - glides with focus on head and arm position, and a few attempts at the two initial drills, swimming on my back and "Sweet Spot", as it is called. Relearning all this stuff isnt going to be easy, but l AM going to be patient. The prize (being able to swim effortlessly in a fish-like way) is definitely worth it!

Like all triathletes and semi-serious fitness types, I like to record my sessions and for my recent IMUK I made a big effort to plan and record my sessions against my plan.  This is for me was doubly motivational on a rainy morning, the fact that there's a big fat zero in the "actual" column might - just - get you out for the session on the start line, you can only remember all the work you've done that got you to that point if you bothered to write it down I am going to blog separately my overall approach to Ironman training (it's not going to cause a revolution in methods), but I wanted to document here how I recorded it, in case others find the level of detail and overall approach useful. For planning and retrospective analysis, I created a spreadsheet with a main sheet for the whole training time (1 row per week, with single columns for targets for swim, bike and run for the week separate sheets for each 4 week "iteration" (next post wil...

Driving back to Shepperton - mid Monday, school holidays - was pretty uneventful, except for a stop for food at Warwick services, where me and Olly met up with a few IMUK competitors “refuelling” in Burger King. Nice to bump into the couple who crossed the line together the previous evening, and a guy in a woolly hat who I'd chatted to in the hotel car park. We got back mid afternoon, and being the sort of guy who likes to get things squared away, I spent a relaxing our getting kit put away, my foul-smelling wetsuit rinsed, and over-ripe bananas consigned to recycling. Then a relaxing evening, before back to work Tuesday. My physical state over the next few days was quite interesting. I'd got some sunburn on my right shoulder (missed that bit in T2), and my quads were sore off and on over the next few days, but to my surprise, my feet were in excellent shape : no blistered or chaffing. Coming downstairs Tuesday morning was harder than it had been Monday, and I re...