Southampton Tri Club’s best new female athlete :-D

It has been such a busy couple of weeks that I’ve struggled to find time to blog – apologies. I’m hoping that I’ll get back up to date soon 🙂

I thought I would share a quick post as this weekend has been particularly exciting. On Saturday, Rob and Stu agreed to pace me at parkrun. They’re doing heart-rate training, so my flat-out race pace is their current training pace. Rob’s really good as a pacer – he guided me around the course advising me to ease back in places and to push harder in others. Unfortunately, I think my tiredness and poor diet this week got the better of me. I also started far too quickly (hello 3:20/km!!!), which probably had an impact on my final result. I was disappointed that I finished in 25:30, which is still 16 seconds slower than my Southampton parkrun PB and 22 seconds slower than my 5k PB… but it was the third fastest time I’ve ever run, so I think that deserves a bit of celebration 🙂

On Saturday evening, we went to Southampton Tri Club Christmas dinner. Suzanne kindly agreed to drive the party wagon, with Katherine, Liz, Stuart and I as her passengers. We managed to get a table together along with Neil and his wife and coach Huw. After we’d had dinner, Darryl stood up to present the awards. The first awards were for the best new athlete (male and female). My friend James won the male award, but he wasn’t able to be the event. I was completely blown away when Darryl awarded me the women’s trophy. It was such a massive surprise and a really lovely way for me to end my first full season.

I managed to get through my seconds in the limelight without going into a rambling Oscars acceptance speech style monologue… I saved that delight for you! Thank you to:

• The coaches at Southampton Tri Club – particularly Huw (running and swimming), Peter (swimming) and Steve (cycling).

I also need to thank a few people from outside Southampton Tri Club who’ve helped to get me this far this year:

• Coach Ant from Run Camp
• Friends, fellow Run Leaders and Coaches at Lordshill Road Runners
• Coaches from Embrace Sports
• The inspirational women who make up Team SOAS
• Coaches from SUTri

and last, but by no means least, Stuart.

The next award was Tim Wilks trophy for ‘the spirit of triathlon’. As soon as Steve started describing the winner as always having a smile on their face, we had an inkling of who it might be… this feeling intensified when he discussed the athlete’s highly unorthodox nutrition strategy. The award was presented to my lovely friend, Liz, who described the half marathon at Weymouth Half Ironman as ‘9 2.5k jogs to each buffet’ or ‘a walking picnic’.

What a fantastic evening 😀

Other news this week:

I’ve become a Training Peaks Ambassador. If you’d like to become a Training Peaks Ambassador, you can sign up here: http://sot.ag/3rKyq

I’ve also been reading lots of interesting things online:

• How much do you know about cycling and the law in the UK? Take this quiz to test your knowledge.
• Eight ways to use Strava to become a better parkrunner. Even if there’s no parkrun near to where you live, you might be able to apply some of these points to any regular runs or races that you do.
• This woman is the most stylish athlete right now. I can’t say that I like all of Maggie Vessey’s outfits, but they are certainly striking. I’d love to have her figure and be able to wear clothing like it. It’ll be interesting to see whether the increased attention based on her looks has any influence on her success as a runner. If the crowd gets behind her then it may help with motivation. What are your thoughts?
• How I drank urine and bat blood to survive – Mauro Prosperi’s account of his attempt to complete the Marathon des Sables.
• Are we becoming a nation of runners? – A BBC news article about the increasing popularity of running in the UK.