One week to go …

It’s late on Saturday evening as I write this. In one weeks time, I will be lying wide awake in a hotel room in Nottingham unable to sleep, with less than 8 hours before the start of the Outlaw long course triathlon.

The training has gone really well lately. I have focused on the swim for the past few weeks. This has meant trying to swim 3 times a week. This has involved two “swim for tri” sessions at the National Pool, and a lake swim to get used to the wetsuit. I am still very slow, but I am definitely swimming more front crawl and it is feeling easier. I did my final lake swim a couple of days ago. I wanted to swim 3.6km but I ended up stopping after 3km. I could feel my neck still sore from the rubbing, and I didn’t want to make it any worse. The great news was that I swam front crawl the entire way around, and still felt strong at the end. I am the most confident I have been of getting through the swim, which was always going to be my worst discipline.

Without having the chance to commute to work on the bike lately, my time in the saddle has been going down. I am starting to get more comfortable on the TT bike, and I love the extra speed. We did a recce of the Outlaw route last weekend, and it’s a perfect course for a TT bike, with plenty of time down on the bars. My main concern is around nutrition and pushing it too hard early on and suffering as a result. I guess both of these are in my control. I practiced today trying to eat more natural food rather than gels. This means I will be using a cycling jersey as it has 3 pockets rather than the 1 on my triathlon top. Pushing too hard will be harder to stop. The key will be to hold back on any drags or when the wind is against.

The run is the one I expect will hurt the most. I know holding back 5-10 minutes on the bike could make all the difference. There is nothing I can do now, so it will be a case of getting through the early miles and just trying to hang on.

When I think about the race I get nervous, but I am also so excited at the prospect of it being over and having achieved a major goal on a bucket list. It’s going to be mentally incredibly hard, and I know there will be plenty of low points on the course when I will just want to quit and I have to push through.

I have my fingers crossed that my next blog post will be one where I have achieved a massive goal!!