Chris Worfolk's Blog

I have been pretty quiet over the past few months because I have been busy with a lot of stuff. I’ll blog about most of that, but one thing I have been putting a lot of time into is my swim.

I have problems breathing through my nose, and so for many years, I thought it was going to be literally impossible for me to do a good front crawl. I was going to focus on it last year, but then I signed up for The Yorkshireman and prioritised improving my cycling.

This off-season finally gave me the opportunity to nail it down. This included private lessons at The Hilton and their silly 14-metre pool, working with my previous coach, Lucia, and workshops with Jack Maitland as well as one booked in for next year with Morgan Williams.

But mostly it has involved a commitment of getting in the pool three times a week for the final three months of the year. That’s a lot of swimming, as well as a lot of walking to and from the pool, washing my hair and trying out my kit ready for the next swim.

The effort has paid off, though. From feeling exhausted after 100 metres, I found I could confidently swim 400 metres, and then 1,500 metres. These are important milestones because these are the two distances that come up most often: pool-based sprints and standard distance open water events.

Most of all, though, it is a testament to anything being possible if you have enough perseverance. By and large, if you do a thing enough times, you will get there.

I love the Abbey Dash as it is a great chance to get together with the running club over a few beers. It’s almost a shame there has to be a run before it.

My 10km run PB was in a strange place. Officially, it was 49:47, set at the 2017 dash. But in 2018 I ran 47:36 at Wetherby Triathlon and 47:12 at World Triathlon Leeds this year. Where they short? Too down hill? Or just my best runs?

I wanted to put that question to rest and so resolved to go out at 47-minute pace. The 22:30 ai ran at parkrun the week before suggested I should be able to run a 47:04 but I was worried that a year of Ironman had eroded my top-end speed.

The weather is always cold so this year I came prepared. The day before I popped down to a charity shop and bought a hoodie to wear before the race. There was a little rain before the race, but otherwise cold and sunny: PN conditions.

This year, the start moved from Wellington Street to The Headrow. Julie says this is the way it used to be. This meant cutting out the congestion point around Cardigan Fields. No speed bumps to jump this year.

My target pace was 4:42 per kilometre. My first km was downhill and came in at 4:32 but I then slowed down to 4:49 for the second. I tried to pick the pace up but couldn’t and slipped a few more seconds behind all of the way to the abbey.

I went around the turn at 23:40, ten seconds behind target pace. I was hurting and wanted to give up, but convinced myself that it might get easier, and even if it didn’t, I wanted to get as close to those triathlon times as possible: 47:10 would still be a PB after all.

The return journey starts with a downhill and I put in a 4:30 kilometre. After that, I didn’t slow down. Harriers kept screaming my name. I was head down racing, it thank you to everyone who did: I did hear you!

By kilometre seven and eight ai had realised that I was slightly ahead and just needed to keep it going. That was a scary prospect given there was a slight climb to The Headrow but I hoped I could rely on the adrenaline of being so close to keep me going.

I kept checking my watch to try and hit the perfect pace. I did not want to go too hard and blow up. I turned on the Galileo tracking (Europe’s GPS satellites) and my watch was pretty spot on with the distances.

As I crossed the line, I stopped my watch and looked down. It read 46:12. I couldn’t believe it. I have no idea where I found that minute. My official time came through via text 30 minutes later.

46:11

I am happy with that. It represents the fastest 10km I could run right now. I paced myself the whole way, pushed hard and kept a consistent heart rate of around 190 bpm.

Thank you to everyone on the route that was cheering us along.

Since the event, it has turned out that the course was 23 metres short. Even with an additional 23 metres, it would still be a PB, so I’m counting it.

Not sure whether the correct term is “yogaversary” or “yogiversary”. But, in any case, I’ve now been doing yoga every week for a full year.

Do I feel more flexible? No. But I don’t feel any less flexible, even after the year I have done. Plus, I’ve gained two kilograms of muscle in my core. Not sure if that is all down to yoga, or from other training, but my guess is it plays a large part.

If you’re using the Slim framework in PHP, there is a breaking change between 3.12.2 and 3.12.3. You’ll need to change where you are inheriting your class from.

- use Interop\Container\ContainerInterface;
+ use Psr\Container\ContainerInterface;

The paperwork has finally come through for my triathlon coaching qualification. Happy days ahead.

One of the reasons I have been so busy is that earlier this month, I launched my new course Sport Psychology for Triathletes course.

This is unlike anything I have done before: it goes into more depth and it is taught “live”, so they are not live lessons, but we onboard everyone with a questionnaire and adapt the content around the cohort of students, and then the lessons as produced each week. It has been a lot of of work but I’m very pleased with the quality so far.

Our first-class of students will graduate in February and I am already looking forward to welcoming the second class in, as well as the many other exciting courses we will be announcing over at Resilient.

I’m a psychologist rather than a counsellor. However, I thought my work with Anxiety Leeds and Leeds Anxiety Clinic, and my life, in general, would benefit from a deeper exploration of the theories around talking therapy and person-centred. So, I enrolled on a course with Leeds City College.

Studying has been fun. In terms of academic theory, the textbooks I have been reading have gone deeper than the course does. However, getting to do the interactive practise sessions to allow us to apply the theory have been invaluable. It already feels like it has been translating into better delivery at our group sessions.

And, I’m now formally qualified as a Level 2 Counsellor, which is nice.

Copenhagen Food is a cookbook by Trine Hahnemann. This book looks beautiful and demonstrates a lot of plain but tasty Nordic cuisine. But that said, I have only made a couple of recipes from it, even though I went through and indexed all of the ones I wanted to try.

Prawns will and homemade mayo is the only recipe I regularly use, which is like twice a year. The only modification to the mayo I have made is to add a little bit of lemon.

Since then, it has languished on my sideboard waiting for a review, which I have not written because I did not really know what to say. So, this is me saying very little.

In fairness, it is titled Copenhagen Food: Stories, traditions and recipes, so the sparsity of recipes is clear from the title.

Goole Triathlon is a sprint race that takes place at the start of October. It starts with a 400 metre pool swim in Goole’s leisure centre (which has a massive slide in it!) before taking in the pan flight sights on a 20km bike and 5km run course.

My dad was there, along with his friend Tim, to do their first sprint distance. I clearly need to stay on my toes as their times were not too far behind mine! Venla came along to cheer them home.

The Deep is the world’s largest submarium. It is also the world’s only submarium because they made it up. Simply put, it is an aquarium that is partially submerged into the sea around it. Does that mean you can look into the ocean and see a bunch of fish? No. Nor could you see anything in The Humber even if they put a window in.

As something to do, it was okay. Aggressively mediocre. It was a sea life centre that they have padded out with a lot of information boards. A lot of the windows are looking into the same fish tank. That said, it was cheaper than the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth, so for value for money, it is reasonable. But it is not better than a Sea Life Centre, so do not make the mistake of getting your expectations sky-high.

The food in the cafe was a low point for me. I once bought a fish and chips ready meal that you had to oven cook. But I microwaved it anyway because it was a ready meal. That is the closest I can come to describing their fish and chips. And the toilets being closed meant we had to change Venla in a corridor.

The jellyfish were nice, though. It is probably worth a visit as long as you are not expecting something amazing.