Getting Back On Track... Well The Road

It's been a long time since I've written one of these but it's about time I did. One of the reasons I started this blog was to motivate myself into regular training, something that's been non existent in recent months. So I'm starting up the old blog to get my training back on track and get me out on the road running as it's only just over a month away till my first event of the year, the Chester half marathon.

Looks like sound breaststroke to me

I'll start with an update of where I am now compared to last year. First things first, the swim. My technique has improved and my front crawl is now mildly faster, problem is I'm still the swimming equivalent of Bambi on ice. I also found out that I've been doing breaststroke wrong all my life and that there's more to backstroke than doing front crawl upside down. I recently went to a training sessions with the Uni swimming team, at one point medley was involved which resulted in one of the swimmers bent over with laughter at my attempts to swim butterfly. Lets just say I won't be winning any medley races any time soon unless I race a hydrophobic quadriplegic and even then it'll be tight. That said, I'm going swimming today so hopefully the excruciatingly slow but steady improvements to my swimming will continue.

The bike. Here's my main triathlon issue at the minute, I'm just not cycling. I've got a bit of a problem with the gears that needs fixing but I keep putting it off. The clocks have gone back and days are longer and slowly getting nicer (the snow has been a big deterrent) so when I'm back in Chester the gears will be fixed and I'll get back out on the bike again. Promise. I've been putting this down to focusing on the next event the Chester half marathon, which I'm running to raise money for Alzheimer's Society so anybody that wants to help out a good cause donate at https://www.justgiving.com/edbrindleyalzheimers or join my guess the time competition (ask me for more details).

Run + Zombies = Fun

So the run. All my focus is going in to the run at the moment seeing as I've never ran a half marathon before. Stupidly enough I've only ever run the entire distance of a half marathon once and that was during the full marathon I ran last October (a clue as to how ill prepared I was). I've had a bit of a problem with pain in my left knee at the minute but I'm taking it steady and having a rest day between each run and early signs suggest the knee is getting better. To be honest resting has been hard lately because I've been dying to go out and combine two of my favourite things: running and zombie apocalypses. This might sound like someone has eaten my brain (get the joke?) but it's because I've got an app called Zombies run! It's basically a story that gets you going and keeps you entertained during runs. Plus turn the GPS on and say yes to zombie hordes who sporadically chase you and suddenly you've incorporated a nice bit of interval training into your run. It's £1.49 well spent so I'd advise you to give it a go if it's your sort of thing.

So other than swimming badly, avoiding my bike and running my way to saving the world from zombies I've just been trying to stop myself eating too much chocolate and failing badly. Oh and I've got a pretty good excuse for not blogging for a while. I've completed my dissertation and all but 4 assignments of my undergraduate studies. I was also chosen by the Uni to present at the BASES student conference which was pretty cool and showed me that it was perfectly acceptable for sport scientists to conduct ECGs on apes. I also have a new, more “professional” twitter so if anyone's on it add me... @edbrindley1

Hopefully now training will become more consistent so watch out Brownlees!