its been almost a month since IM France, and good to have a bit of a break from racing to attend to the 'few' other bits and pieces that go along with moving into a new house. we tackled the the process of moving the contents of two people's lives, which has been stored across 5 different locations in the UK, with suberb efficiency and 4 dyas van hire. the process of finding suitable places to stow it in what had seemed like a generously sized house before i realized quite how much stuff i was inheriting as a result of steven's 15 years of previos house ownership coupled with a tendancy for sentimental attachment, proved far less simple and is sill ongoing.
having first attacked two upstairs bedrooms with bold coloured paint to seal our ownership of the new territory, the next job on the to do list was deck out the loft. hows about an hour run, 6 hour ride, fish and chips for lunch and then an evening laying a raised floor in the attic for a tiring day?? it was good fun to do something together though, and having shown steven the process required, he was away and got the job finished the following morning whilst i was at the gym.
With Ironman Ukon the hoizon i was a bit concious of how much time i could give to home improvemnts over training and expect my stuff to remain in boxs and piles until after that race (but i do promise to sort it out soon steven)but even so its a pretty distracting process, with lots of discussion and desisions tobe made relating to where the knives and forks/dvds/laundry basket/candles/(insert previouslytaken-for-granted household item) should live and i was getting only about 2/3rd of my planned training done. I should point out that this is considerably more than steven, who is certainly the organised and tidy member of the household and has been cracking on with sorting his stuff (of which there is plenty) and took a complete break from training whilst doing so. This fits with his race season as he is about to hit the Kona prep.
Anyway when Jenny rang and invited me to go with her for a weekend trainig and checking out the IMUK course i jumped at the chance for a few days away and to get back to a 100% trainingfocus. Worst luck for us, we left sunny london friday afternoon and drove 4 hours north to a weekend of constant and at times torrential northern rain. both of us on our gleaming time trial bikes and she with carbon rimmed Lightweight wheels with cork brake blocks = no stopping in the wet, this did result in saturday morning driving around searching for a useable pool. luckily we found the manchester aquatics center. not bad! in the afternoon we rode a tough 5hrs on the course (with penty of detours and the comedic realisation that we were doing the 'loop' the wrong way round) .That's a 'value for money ' bike route, and can see a lot of people hitting the forst lap way too hard and paying on the third! It's the sort of constantly rolling terrain that you can quite easily muscle over when feeling fresh, but the power surges required to do so will make themselves known later in the ride! the rain was worse the folowing day, so we went and did a run on the run course. hmmm. another challenging route lined up for us!! we did figure that the with start and finish different locatins it had to be a net descent, but certainly enough runnig uphill to make that seem hard to believe.
despite teh poor weather stoping us riding onsunday, we did manage to tick off 19hrs of training over the weekend and jenny drove about 9 hrs on top of that before returning to work on monday morning. i bet she was fresh and chirpy ;o)
i've hung about in london a bit - catching up with a few friends, getting a massage etc - and today headed out to the university of surrey to deliver a presentation for a group of NLP practitioners who are on a training course being run by my friend Jeremy Lazarus. I met jeremy about 5 years ago when he was looking for trial subjects to work with as he was extending his work in Neural Linguistic Programming into the field of sports performace. The sessions that we did together then helped me a lot, i became very interested in the subject, didd a lot of reading around it and continue to use the principles that i learned from him today. we have stayed in touch since then and i help him out a s a guest speaker on these coursess fromtime to time. Aside from training master NLP practitioners to train others, jeremy now is something of a specialist in applying NLP principles for sports http://www.winningatsport.com/
its fun to go and talk to a group of non sporting people and good ractice for me to be less nervaous about speakig in front of a group. so when i'm making those acceptance speaches , i'll be set ;o)
this evening its back on a train to taunton, survey the state of the house (hopefully immaculate now that he's had a week with no distractions!) - perhaps even get aroundtoputting upthose shelves, and do my lasyt week of trainig before IM UK....
