After years of sniggering at triathletes and their silly training regimes and bike handling skills, Charlie is finally going to race a triathlon or two.
I have been at it for a month or two now and to begin with it seemed pretty simple; train 5 or 6 days a week, an hour in the pool, an hour’s run or a couple of hours on the bike each time and finnish each session whimpering with exhaustion. But now I find out that I was doing it all wrong – rather than jump in the water and whip myself into an agony of exertion, or run like I was Coe breaking the mile record for the first time (remeber the last brutal 100m?) or ride a bike like a drug free domestique in the Tour de France, I have now found out that I need to do some complicated arithmetic involving my age and resting pulse, buy a heart rate monitor and then make sure I train in my aerobic zone (130 to 140 bpms more or less). Where is the fun in that!? That is exactly why cyclists laugh at triathletes and why nobody wants to sit next to a triathlete at dinner.
Triathletes of the world you have nothing to lose but your chains! Throw away your training calendars, your heart rate monitors and your food-weighing scales and just do what the hell you feel like each day (but just do it hard). You might lose a couple of minutes on your PB, but who is counting anyway?
Rant over….
