Archive for October, 2021

Chuffed. I took me 21 months for my parkrun 100 t-shirt to turn up so I was super excited when this arrived just nine days after I did my 250th parkrun. The new set fee regardless of where you are in the world seems to be working well.

I was hoping to set a new 10k PB at the Abbey Dash this year but then I picked up the flu the week before and spent the week in bed. When I got up on Sunday morning, I was still feeling exhausted and decided not to go. But then I looked at all of my previous blog posts from the Abbey Dash and decided not to break my streak.

So, I put plenty of warm clothes on and toddled around in:

1:04:57

23 minutes behind where I would have liked to have been but technically a finisher.

Well done to everyone else who ran, including Toby who achieved his first sub-35 and Will hook achieved his first sub-40. And thank you to everyone from HPH and beyond that was out cheering.

I’ve been looking to bolster my coaching with some additional training from British Athletics. To do this, you have to go through their entry-level qualifications to access them, regardless of your coaching background in other sports. While this would usually be a routine thing in normal times, it is a little more complicated during COVID times.

British Athletics’s strategy for dealing with COVID was to stop running in-person training and require people to film an activity and submit the video. I did not find this clear when I signed up (perhaps I didn’t read closely enough) but it shifted the responsibility onto us, even though we were in a lockdown at the time. Thus there was a three-month delay between doing the theory webinars and delivering some coaching.

After that, we also had to complete a safeguarding course, the same week as I was doing my British Triathlon safeguarding course, and complete a DBS check, all of which has now been done.

Therefore, I think I’m now a LiRF? It’s a bit messy working with British Athletics because they have Athletics Portal, and Athletics Hub, and DREAMS, and they don’t necessarily say the same thing.

Thank you Curtis for supervising and filming our practical, and Danni and Jonathan for teaming up for the group practical.

For the past six months, I’ve been cycling along the Appalachian Trail virtually. After 90 rides and 3,168 kilometres covered, I’ve finished! This was the longest Conqueror challenge until they added Pacific Crest and the last one I have on the go. Time to give my legs a break, I think!

I’ve joined the 250 club! Thank you to all of the marshalls, my parents for coming over and running it with me, and everyone who hung around at Coffee on the Crescent for a chat after the run.

I recently teamed up with my friends Peter Alkema and Tracey Ashington to launch our new course all around interview skills to candidates applying to technical and IT roles. If you want to sharpen your skills before your next interview, this is the course for you.

Tracey is a career coach with decades of experience in recruitment. Peter is a digital transformation and leadership expert who wrote his PhD thesis on agile methodology.

Inside the course, we cover:

• Pre-interview preparation
• Technical tests and pairing exercises
• Answering questions like a pro
• Psychology of interviewing
• Adapting your skills for online interviews

If you want to find out more, you can preview the course here.

My 18th and final triathlon of the year was a family affair with my dad and my sister racing, as well as friends Tim and Sophie. Plus with Elina, Venla and my mum forming the cheering squad it was very social day.

If you are thinking that a triathlon in October sounds like a chilly affair, you would be correct. I had my leggings, Merino base layer, hoodie and coat on and I was still freezing. Still, there was some silver lining: it was dry which was a big improvement on the heavy rain when we went to cheer my dad on in 2019.

Registration was 6-7 am which meant getting up at 5 and driving over in the dark. I had to wait until the sun came up to get the stickers on my bike as I couldn’t see the edges of the sticker sheet. This meant standing around for three hours waiting for my 9:10 start time. Thankfully, the butty van eventually turned up at around 8 am.

The swim

400-metre pool swim. I was in lane one which allowed us a little more space for overtaking. I had to sprint past two athletes on my second length and then got tagged by an athlete halfway through who I then ended up sitting on the feet of for the rest of the swim. Not sure if it was poor pacing on his part of the benefit of drafting but either way I was on the poolside in 8:36 by my watch.

After clocking up an eye-watering 18:51 T1 at Dalesman, this was a faff-free affair and I was out of there in 54 seconds.

The bike

The bike course was pan flat. There was some wind. I didn’t mind the headwind so much, it was the crosswind that made me a little nervous on the aero bars as I had to lean the bike a little in the wind. My speed was not quite what I wanted, I think because I had to stop at multiple junctions to wait for cars, as well as having to stop for cars overtaking parked cars and slower cyclists.

When I left T1, I left my gloves and arm warmers as I felt warm enough. I felt fine throughout the bike but when I arrived in T2, getting my socks and shoes on proved difficult due to numb hands.

The run

Once I was onto the run, I felt great. It was a straightforward out and back route and I went through the first two kilometres in 4:02. I thought about trying to push on for a 5k PB but correctly guessed that the course might come up short. A lost a couple of seconds in the third kilometre working out which way to go but then held the pace for the rest of the run.

The result

I finished in:

1:04:23

Here are my splits:

The bike course measured around 18 k so I averaged 31.5 kph. The run came in at 4.68 km which translates to a 4:02 pace. The race winner was about 10 minutes ahead of me, taking 2 minutes in the swim, 6 minutes on the bike and 2 minutes in the run. Very happy with that.

For a brief period, I was 2nd on the leaderboard.

It’s done in swim-speed order so the faster athletes tend to go later. But even after everyone had finished, I was still 28 out of 148. That means nothing in my age group though as 6 of the top 7, including the race winner, were also in the male 35-39 group 😂.

Everyone else smashed it, too. My dad may well have run a 5k PB if it was full distance and Katie was running great, too. I went past her on the way out but she was still right behind me when I reached the turnaround: not bad for her first-ever sprint triathlon!