By Tim on 20/07/2007 17:49

Almost exactly a year ago I bit the bullet and entered my first Ironman distance race (Austria), I had just spent my first proper season in triathlon, had done a ½ ironman race and numerous sprint / olympic races and wanted to next test myself over the longer distances where I thought my strength might lie.

So in July 2006 I found myself organising hotels, flights and car hire in Austria for a year later with an incredibly daunting next 12 months of training laid out in front of me.

Training properly didn’t really start till September 2006 when I returned home from a 3 week holiday in australia to start an autumn and winter of base miles and k’s in the pool.  It all went so well!  I used the club sessions 90% of the time and became a regular on the Saturday morning rides and the Thursday / Sunday evening swims.  I commuted pretty much every day during the winter  (4 days on the bike and 1 running each week) initally from Hammersmith but then, after I bought a flat in Kingston, across Richmond park...

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By philroker on 05/07/2007 10:28

I sometimes think being a member of Ful-on-Tri can give you a distorted vision of triathlon. Last year we had 24 Ironman finishers, and this year will see even more,  with some guys completing more than one in a season. We also had 8 representatives at the World 70.3 Championships last year, and 2 at the World Ironman Championships in Hawaii. You could be forgiven for thinking that completing an Ironman isn’t really that big a deal, and qualifying is within all our grasps.

I’ve just done my first Ironman, having been competing in Tri for 14 years, and I have to let you in on a secret – Ironman is hard, really hard. It’s make-you-want-to-cry, or curl-up-in-a-ball-on-the-side-of-the-run-course kind of hard.

By all accounts Frankfurt is a really nice course, and the organisation of it just blows your mind – they do everything possible to make the whole event as painless as possible, except run 26.2 miles for you (I asked, but they wouldn’t play ball)

17 of us completed Frankfurt last Sunday, and I’m sure someone will give more of a blow-by-blow account than this – I’ll just give you a brief summary, cos I have a different point to make…

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By Greg Keers on 03/07/2007

Stuart Dillon, Richard Bulkley and I just completed 543km of cycling of the London Paris Tour over 3 days and here are a few notes about how we got on (yes that is Sean Kelly with us in the photo!)...

We had a fantastic few days of road racing over closed roads with a full support service of lead cars, 10s of motorbikes operating rolling road closures, mechanics and masseurs. There were around 150 riders in 3 groups from fun riders through to competitive road racers. We started in group 2 but after Stu and I eased to a 1-2 finish in that group's first hill climb competition we found the confidence to move up with the big boys of group 1 for the afternoon of the first day (well actually I had to nag and persuade Stu for about an hour before he gave in and agreed and then Richard jumped in the deep end too). Within a few kilometres of fast rolling with a much more disciplined peleton we had big smiles on our faces. It was quite unbelievable to take a look to see who was on your shoulder only to find it was...

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