I'd heard it was an end of season jaunt - a weekend away in mid wales with a few beers, pub food, and a good bike ride.

Then Stew Ward emails me saying that he had managed to get a last minute entry and that last year "the first triathlete home did just over 5 hours, how would you feel about going hard?". We still had a couple of weeks or so to go at this point so without too much in the way of thought, I agreed. Email banter in the week leading up to it got progressively more stupid, consisting of the usual - "do you think i can get away with my carbon wheels", "what gearing you going for?" to the far more juvenile - Stew's - "i've just bought a 29 campy cassette off wiggle" was met with my - "they only make those for short ginger girls" (no offence intended Natalie....)

I turned up at Pj's on Saturday afternoon to load up the CSC/Cervelo team car. With the roof ... Read More »

With a hideous headwind slowing me to a snail's pace, a throbbing left hamstring and another hilly 26 mile bike lap ahead I had plenty of time to reflect on how I ended up doing the Vitruvian Half Ironman last weekend.And I realised I had Charlie Brooke to thank for my current predicament.

At New Year during a discussion about our attitude towards training he decided that myself and Joolz Howe were more like 'ladies who lunch' than committed triathletes. I'm sure to him it was just a casual throwaway comment to make us all laugh, but no, we certainly didn't forget. And when the opportunity arose to raise money for a leukaemia charity after a friend's child tragically died, the Vitruvian seemed not only a suitably mentallist challenge but also a way of proving ... Read More »