This Girl Can

"We just come as we are. We don't *look* at each other. We might have our rough days. We don't mind that. We don't see that." [Netball lady in Behind The Scenes]

This has to be one of the most powerful and appropriate campaigns to get more women into sport.  It hits on the head one of the main contributors preventing women getting into sport: the fear of judgement/what other people think.

I'd say almost all women have thought or still do think a combination of the following when they consider doing sport either at all, or if they already do sport, when they get their kit on to do it (there's only one on the list I *haven't* thought myself):-

• I look lumpy/like a bag of sausages
• My boobs are uneven
• My belly is huge
• My back spills out around my bra straps/my belly/sides spills out of the top of my shorts/tights
• My arms/thighs/boobs/belly will wobble
• My knees are fat
• Someone will see my stretch marks
• I can't do $particular_movement elegantly
• I'll go red and blotchy/get sweaty patches in embarrassing places
• My makeup will run
• I might fall over/off (my bike/scooter/horse/treadmill/stepper...)
• I'll come last

And it either results in putting women off starting to do sport (or sometimes starving themselves if they already do do sport).  The thing is... none of that list matters, nobody will actually care and nobody will point and laugh at you.  Most people are in their own little world, most people are thinking those things themselves and focusing on their own difficulties and the rest are enjoying themselves.

This campaign focuses on the fact that most of us aren't perfect, most of us do have blemishes and jiggly bits (even elite and professional athletes, trust me) and that's OK 'cause you can enjoy yourself, push yourself physically, have your own "you" time when you're not just a label (wife, mother, carer etc.) and how you look doing it, compared with a fantasy ideal, doesn't matter.

This is me (below) after a triathlon last year.  I would usually pick a photo where I look muscular, slim and have no visible bulges and lumps, but this is how I looked on the day.  I wasn't quick, I didn't look slinky, I had lumps, jiggly bits and dimply legs, my boobs were wonky and spilled out under my arm-pits.  But I had fun!  I enjoyed it!  And nobody at all laughed or pointed at me.

So, watch the film and pass it on.  (Cry a bit, like I did.  It's OK.)  And watch the behind the scenes clip too... I love the first quote, "We just come as we are. We don't *look* at each other. We might have our rough days. We don't mind that. We don't see that."

And go do some sport!

Thames Path: T-1

It's the day before the day I catch a train to Kemble, to the start of the river Thames.  And I'm feeling apprehensive.  There are a good few unknowns and the weather is being unkind.

The last couple of weeks have been very light, training-wise, busy and stressful work-wise and having made an error at the Clapham Common race last weekend, I'm even lower on miles than planned.  The last few weeks have seen 38 miles, 20 miles, 28 miles, 17 miles... so, of course, I feel under-fit right now.  The usual fears are surfacing, but it's madder than usual as this is not a race.  There are no cut offs.  I've run a reasonable chunk of the route recently.

Conversely; I've not run the section from the source to Cholsey and the earlier sections seem like they're going to be tougher navigation-wise.  The first large-ish section there's not even a river to follow, there are sections that are just running across a field, then there's a bunch of streams and lakes to get confused by.  I've not run more than three days in a row before and certainly not averaged 30 miles a day for even three days in a row, or even two.  So I have no idea how my body is going to respond to that, but my gut feeling is that it'll actually be pretty OK.

I've not run with my full pack for over 3 weeks now either, so that'll be sub-optimal when I start on Saturday morning with it on again.  But, I ran my fastest 10K to date this last weekend, so I think underlying "stuff" is pretty strong, so I should be OK.

Let's see how many cycles of "yay" and "argh" I go through in the next 40 hours to the off from the rock in the field in Oxfordshire!

New Year Thoughts - Finding A Coach

Something many aspiring athletes think about at this time of year is; I need a more structured training plan next year and I need help to do that.  I want to get a coach.

Having a coach who has years of experience, study and practical understanding can really help you avoid the common pitfalls of training for sport; of which there are there are many and various.  And the comfort of knowing that someone else is looking after your training schedule and optimising it for your event calendar and keeping an eye on how you're doing can make life simpler/less stressful.  And when you get closer to an event and start worrying about things, they can really help you stop doom-mongering, stop worrying about things that aren't important and reflect on all of the great work you've done and forgotten about.

But how do you find a coach that's appropriate for you?

1. Budget
2. Frequency of interaction
3. Training plan
4. Chemistry

First of all, you need to work out what your budget is.  But that can be difficult if you have no idea what the going rates are for the levels of service you get.  So, we'll come back to that.

Secondly, do you want to work with your coach face-to-face on a frequent basis, or are you happy with an online coach who you speak to on the phone regularly, or do you not need a personal interaction at all?  If the former, you may well be best off working with a personal trainer (PT) at a local gym or with a coach at a local club for your sport.  PTs aren't cheap (central London prices at a top-end gym is around £50 per 1 hour session), but you do get 1:1 training time and if you need that kind of interaction, then you're going to have to fork out for it.

Online/remote coaching can have quite a high level of interaction.  There are many companies who have a range of coaching plans that include a weekly (or even more) call with your coach and training weekends through the year (which cost extra on top of your monthly fee).  A weekly call with your coach in the off season can feel like too much, but you don't have to take them every week if you don't want to - companies are happy to take your money and you miss out on part of the service ;o)  These sorts of coaching packages cost anything from £60 a month, for up to £300 a month depending on interaction, personalisation, response times to questions, extras like sports psychology support.

Thirdly, a training plan is quite key to most people's need for a coach.  You can purchase training plans, from many companies online, which are just a general written plan and not tailored in any way.  These can be quite economical (e.g. £30 or so for a 12 week programme) and effective if you just want to get a structured, consistent plan and you're good at self-motivation.  You'd be surprised how self-motivated you can be if you have a plan that's written out for you already.  Some people need or want a bit more personalisation or interaction than that and that's when you probably want to get a coach who will personalise a plan for you, that you feed back your achievements from each training session and they modify the plan as you go along; on a weekly or monthly basis, usually depending on how much you're paying.

Lastly, if you are going for a personal coach or trainer rather than an off-the-shelf training plan, you want to check out the chemistry.  Having been through 4 gym PTs and 2 triathlon coaches so far, I can vouch for the benefits of really getting on with a trainer/coach.  You need to have faith in their ability and understanding of you and the sport and they need to instil confidence in you.  You'll only find that out by spending some time working with them.

My first triathlon trainer/coach didn't give me the level of confidence in him that I needed for me to believe I'd achieve my basic goal for 2012 by working with him and that meant I had to change quite close to the wire for the tough part of the season.  I'm so glad I did change coach and I've ended up with one I have a lot of trust and faith in now.  He really helped stabilise my mental as well as physical preparedness for the Ironman Ultimate Challenge events this year and with his help I made it through 3/4 of them (OK it was outside of both our control that I didn't make it to the start line of the 4th one, but I have no doubt that I would have completed the 4th one, had I not smashed up my collar bone at the 3rd one).  And I didn't feel silly asking him about the terminology in the training sessions he gave me.

So, back to budget... you need to think about the frequency, type of interaction and training plan you want in order to inform your decision on budget.  You can see you can spend anything from £30 for a 12 week generic training plan to £300 per month for a highly personalised, all the extras, fairly unlimited phone/online interaction arrangement.

So, now that you know what to look for, how do you actually find a coach?  Ask around, see who's advertising in the press of your sport, ask other athletes at events.  Or look for a coaching company that's doing a training day or weekend near you, or one that does a course familiarisation day for a race/event you're doing and go along.  Yes, this will cost you money, but you'll get to meet some coaches and see if you get along with them.  This is pretty much how I found my current coach, though I didn't meet him on the familiarisation day I thought the other coaches from the company were switched on and easy to get along with so I took a punt.

When you decide on a coach or trainer, don't be afraid to have a trial period to see if you get on.  Talk to them face-to-face or on the phone before signing up with them, if you can.  If you don't get on right away or after a few weeks, or even months, or you don't feel you believe in them in the right way, don't be afraid to change coach.  There is utterly nothing wrong with that.  You need to trust them to train and coach you well and you need to believe that they will do you good, support you and boost your confidence when it's needed.  The best thing I did during the 2012 season was change coach and it made a huge difference to my mental state, confidence, performance and ultimately my enjoyment of my sport.

Peak training session

After the hill reps on the familiarisation day, I had the hardest, longest training session ever.  A 6 and a half hour brick; 5 hour bike, 1.5 hour run.  And it turned out to be a tiny bit longer as you can never be -quite- sure about traffic and pace...

I was due to do 3 sets of over-gearing for 15 minutes but it got difficult due to the terrain.  Firstly, due to the awful road surface around East Clandon, I was just chowing down on a particularly tasty Mule bar, when I hit a bump and 90% of the bar (I'd just had one bite) slid out of the wrapper and bounced down the road, leaving me holding an empty wrapper and a grouchy expression.  Then as I decided to use the first hill to start an over-geared section, it was too high a gradient descent to carry on putting in any effort at all so I ended up with not even 10 minutes for the first repetition.  The second one I started before my favourite hill - Crocknorth.  I think I got about 12ish minutes in to the over-gearing repetition and then hit the hill itself which needed no over-gearing whatsoever.  The third go was coming in to Box Hill and included Box Hill itself, which I left myself in 4th gear for just to make it a bit harder.  Interestingly, I was a bit tired going up Box Hill and actually fancied leaning on my tri-bars, so I did that almost all the way up and it was fine.  In fact, it was really rather comfy.

On reflection, I don't think I'm doing over-gearing right.  Or rather, making it hard enough.  I don't know.  It's hard when there's nothing to measure against and I still have relatively little experience at all of this stuff.  I was doubtful enough that I decided to do one more over-geared section while out on the Thames Turbo route towards the end, where I did manage to squeeze in another 15 minutes of it.

Garmin gets over-excited about kcals - I actually burned 2254kcals (and consumed 1387kcals, 239g carbs - needed 300g for the ride, in theory)

I thought I'd done over 125km on the bike.  Mostly because I accidentally hit the lap counter when I was trying to get the display back to cadence after moving the position of the Garmin on the bike and knocking it into a different display that I really wasn't interested in at the time.  Hey ho.  So, it's still quite a long way and the furthest in a single bike ride to date - and with only one wee stop, the longest in the saddle to date.

Hopping off the bike at home, I scampered for another wee (yeah, I think I was hydrated enough despite having not finished the two 750ml bottles on the ride), changed out of my bib-tights and cycling top into capri tights and a running t-shirt as well as out of my cycling shoes and into my favourite trainers and off out for a 90 minute run.

It took a while to settle into a stride that felt OK - I was worried that all the fatigue I accumulated on the ride and the previous two days would hit home and I'd run out of endurance.  But no, this was a really useful run to have in the mental bank as well as physical.  Once I got into my stride, I felt pretty good.  And by the time I got home, I felt like I could have carried on.  It wouldn't have been pretty and I'd've been quite knackered, but I could have gone on.

My IM run pace is around 06:12/km (I think) and, after this brick, I now think I will actually be able to sustain that over 42km on the day.  This brick session showed me a few things, one of which is that yes although there is a certain amount of background fatigue that accumulates, with the appropriate fuelling and a good taper, on the day it'll be achievable.  I was worried that I'd just be really dead in the legs, they'd feel awful throughout the whole run and I'd need to use all the psychological tricks in the book to get to the end of the run course.

These are my km splits for this brick session and remembering that there is a non-trivial hill in there, that's some quite encouraging data.  And my effort level was nicely consistent...

Got 2 streets away and turned back to get a gel to keep me going - I didn't need to find out what bonking feels like today

I must say that I didn't feel sparkling when got home, but after a Recovery XS and a chicken and avocado bagel and a 10 minute sit down, I was fine to trot out to sit in the cinema for two hours.  And 8 hours sleep later (which I really rather needed), ready to get up and go for a 2.4km swim :o)

This brick session gave me a great confidence boost.  Mostly around learning that longer races are a little bit like the shorter ones; once you get stuck into the next discipline, the previous one fades in the memory a bit and doesn't have a huge effect unless you've over-cooked it and/or not taken on board enough calories/carbohydrates.  If you have managed your effort well and fuelled well, you're in good stead for motoring on.  I did 1.38x the 70.3 bike distance (with around half of the hills) and 0.75x the run (with 1/3 the hills).  After a few days of fatiguing myself.  And I feel fine. (and when I wrote this, I'd just done a 2.4km swim and another 1.25 hours on the bike - rest day today!)

Raaaaar!

I have a new coach.  And I think the chemistry/cultural fit is a hell of a lot better.  Where coachJez did a great job with my swim technique, the rest was very much lacking and not working.  So, having really got on with the guys from TheTrilife.com at the Wimbleball (UK 70.3) familiarisation weekend, I decided to take the plunge and move to being coached by one of their coaches.  I was lucky enough to be able to get a place working with Richard Jones, head coach at TheTriLife.com and not only a very well qualified coach, but a very experienced and talented triathlete himself.

The first few weeks of training programme look pretty intimidating, to be honest, but there's a lot of work to do and not very long to do it in.  A lot of the initial sessions are about getting me to understand pacing at all and setting some good habits and basics in place that are simply missing at the moment.  The first swim session on the programme looked horribly complicated but ohgod was it so much fun to do!  I really enjoyed it and it wasn't as complicated as it looked.  The run and bike sessions have been similarly fun and mentally stimulating as well as helping to get a good base muscular feel for cadence and pace.

Noisy graph, but it shows a nice average of around 92rpm.  Good start!

Today's bike ride was a very positive and confidence boosting.  I managed to keep to the cadence target set and got myself into a great position with some bike handling skills that I've been worried about so far - I can now actually take a drink in the saddle almost easily!  I managed it 9 times over the ride as well as getting on and off the clip-on tri-bars in the sections less busy with traffic.  It sounds silly and trivial, but I've struggled with it to date and I think a combination of a huge confidence boost plus a steady cadence has tipped me over the sticking point from where I couldn't manage to do it to being a lot more comfortable with it.

After today's ride, I feel absolutely fabulous.  Full of confidence and the joys of spring.  I guess the sunshine helped as well as the successful ride.  Raaaar!