Red Bull Neptune Steps

I’m on a climbing wall, but I’m fully clad in neoprene.  I swam to the bottom of the wall in bracing 7°c water that took my breath away, but I’m still struggling to catch my breath because there’s water pouring down on me from above.  Although I can’t feel my numb hands I’m trying to ascend the wall, but the competitor below me has her hand where I want to put my foot.  I know that when I reach the top of the wall I’ll have to dive into the cold water on the other side.  Is this some crazy cheese-fuelled nightmare?  If not, how on earth did I get here?

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Race Report: Aberfeldy Middle Distance Triathlon, 17th August 2014

Exactly three weeks after the amazing Castles Challenge Middle Distance Tri in Bamburgh I competed over the same distance at Aberfeldy, in a race that also happened to be the British Championships.  The ‘British Championship’ part had been of little interest to me until after my success in Bamburgh, when I realised that my training had paid off and I was on my best form ever.  Now I started wondering what might be possible at Aberfeldy – it was a course I knew and enjoyed, and the age group I’d be competing in would be smaller than the whole field at Bamburgh, BUT the field would be much stronger, attracting triathletes from across the country, and the swim would be much shorter, so I wouldn’t have ‘the Bamburgh advantage’!  That way madness lies, I quickly realised, so I sensibly concluded that there was no point getting hung up on whether I could finish on the podium again (don’t believe a word of it: it nearly drove me mad!).

Race Report: Castles Challenge Middle Distance Triathlon (27 July 2014)

Hello there blogosphere, it’s been a while!  Almost a year since I wrote about my first middle distance tri – Aberfeldy 2013.  I enjoyed Aberfeldy so much that I concluded that the middle distance tri (aka half ironman) really suited me: I decided to concentrate on this distance in 2014, so I entered two.  My first was on July 27th – the Castles Challenge in the beautiful setting of Bamburgh, Northumberland – and the second will be Aberfeldy again, on August 17^th.  So, here I’ll recap on my training and report on the Bamburgh race.