A long and windy road! What have I been up to?!

My last post was written in April, while I had Covid. While I tested positive for 10 days, thankfully I didn’t have too many days with symptoms and therefore was able to continue with some light indoor bike sessions towards the later stages of that 10day perdiod.

Post-Covid Training

The first few “proper” sessions post-Covid were harder work for the same effort, which I guess was to be expected and that phase passed pretty quickly. I also got my first Open Water swim of the year done which was great to do.

It’s been a little over 6 months since my last blog post. I tested positive for Covid a few days ago, so this enforced mini-period of rest seems like a good opportunity for a brief recap on how the journey is progressing.

Training plan

One of the first tasks after booking my place was to research and find a training plan that would help get me from my current levels of fitness and ability to the point where I successfully finish an Ironman. After some searching, I came across TriDot (https://tridot.com). It appeared to meet all of my needs in terms of scheduling sessions across each of the disciplines, appealed to my inner data-nerd as the platform takes in the data from each activity and then tailors future sessions to your current ability. Initially, I had some reservations, but the community feedback I saw at the time spoke of people using the platform experiencing significant performance improvements and “race” day successes. I’m now 6 months into using TriDot and can safely say my experience has been amazing. Through periodic “assessments”, you can monitor performance progress over time. During these 6 months, I have seen my 5k run time improve from over 22minutes to 20:36, my swim CSS times go from 2:05m/100 to 1:55m/100 - I know 10seconds per 100metres may not sound a lot, but for me, this is solid progress in the weakest of the disciplines.

Yes, it’s true - I have entered a full Iron-distance event: Ironman Copenhagen 2022.

If you are new to the site, my name is Anthony and I’m based in Maidstone, UK.

I intend to document my journey along the way, to share my thoughts and experiences as my training progresses.

But first, a little bit of back story to set the scene.

My fitness journey started around January 2015 when I joined Beginners2Runners in Coxheath, near Maidstone. Up to this point, I hadn’t really been doing any exercise and felt that I should be doing something to keep active and healthy.

London Marathon Fundraising Page

Marathon Stuff

IRONMAN COPENHAGEN

I’m writing these notes up, mainly as a reference for me in the future - but they might just help others looking to do similar.

Issue:

During the Coronavirus season, our church, like many, ventured into the world of streaming services, primarily to YouTube but with an eye to multiplexing to both YouTube and Facebook at the same time.

Initially, the plan was to stream from OBS Studio to an intermediate platform, restream.io

Project History!

The intention of this post is to serve as an aide-memoire for a little project I’ve been working on recently.

From time to time, I lead worship at my church, and play acoustic guitar.  For song lyrics / chord charts I use a popular app on IOS called Onsong.

A while ago I found an old guitar foot switch unit that started life belonging to a Marshall amp.  I took most of it’s inwards out and wired up a simple Bluetooth keyboard to the 4 main switches, and then in turn, paired this with my Ipad.  Within Onsong settings, I configured the footpedal options to respond to “keyboard” presses - u = Up, d = down, n = next song .and p = previous song.

The lovely London Marathon page on Facebook today popped up to say there are 9 days to go!!!

The most fantastic way to start this update is to be able to say I have reached my Fundraising target and at the time of posting it stands at - £ 2127.65 I am truly humbled and blessed by the generosity that people have shown in supporting WaterAid in helping me reach this target.

Having been a month since my last post, I figured it’s about time for a quick update.

I took part in the Cancer Research ‘Winter Run’ on the 31st January.  It’s a popular 10k race starting in Trafalgar Square, and finishing along Whitehall. It was the first race of it’s size that I’ve taken part in, with around 15,000 people taking part. I really enjoyed it, especially as I finished in 53:32 which is about 4 minutes off my previous 10k PB!

Eek!! So it seems I’ve hit the big 100 day countdown, and now it’s time to get serious!

I started my formal training plan at the beginning of the year, but now its crunch time! So far, it seems to be going really well - running 3 - 4 times a week, with a longer run most Sundays!

I’ve forcefully become acclimatised to arctic temperatures to run in - all included in the fun of being a crazy marathon runner!

I realised it would probably be helpful to share some of the background to why I am running the Marathon, who I will be running for and why.

Why am I doing this ?

I had the opportunity to go to Rwanda in 2005 and I have very clear memories from that trip of seeing people walking huge distances, carrying heavy water containers - on a daily basis.  Everyone appeared to have to go through this - from the youngest to the oldest.