About 3 weeks to go until this challenge and I guess that all is going roughly according to plan. To my surprise I haven't really struggled with the physical aspect of it, but perhaps I forgot what else could get in the way.
I recently spent 72 hours recovering from yet another cold. Not nearly as bad as last time but still, 3 days off exercise is 3 days not getting fitter. To pass the time I have been checking over my steed and all is not well. The R wheel has come back from South Africa slightly less straight than your average ring doughnut. I don’t know if it happened towards the end of the race or in the flight but it needs fixed before the triathlon; 180km is long enough when all your energy is going in the right direction. And for some reason my rear derallieur is only moving through 9 of the 10 gear positions it should have. I cannot fathom what’s going on at all. It’s not a massive problem in that I think I could set it up to run smoothly on 9 of my 10 gears (as opposed to currently it running badly on all of them) but you want everything to be perfect for a race so you’re not worrying about it. And if it chooses to get worse half way up Col de Vence then it’ll be a long and depressing walk back to Nice...
On the plus side running and riding has been going well. SA was a brilliant boost to the riding training and the running distances are getting realistic now without feeling too much like hard work. I recently entered the US embassy’s 10km race here in Dar and was pleased to come in 2nd. I thought I could win it for a while but the local guy with whom I was battling at the front knew what he was doing. He saw his moment when I was struggling a little and made sure he hurt me enough then that I couldn’t pull the gap back, and he beat me by about 10 seconds. Hats off to him, he was a fit lad.
Even my swimming is improving a bit. The incentives to practise down in Mtwara are massive; the water is beautifully clear and warm and you are surrounded by half the cast of Finding Nemo. I am optimistic now about going the distance, especially with the advantage of a wetsuit to buoy my confidence. Sure, the whirling salt and neoprene froth which is the start will still terrify me, but now it feels more like terror than panic, and that seems a slight improvement. I should explain in case anyone new is reading now; I could not swim a length of a pool until I was 31. I mean I had “swimming lessons” at little school, but a lesson consisted of being placed in the shallow end of the local pool; if you could swim to the deep end you got a badge, if not you tried again next week. Now I’ve taken some adult lessons and been lucky to have help and advice from the Mrs. Now Suze herself does not swim either. Rather she gets into a pool and all the water spontaneously chooses to flow past her, and suddenly she is at the other end. There’s an effortless beauty to it which is an inspiration when you are as splashy and square in the water as I am. Little by little, pole pole, I approach her standard, although like a logarithmic graph I will never quite get there. I just hope I have got close enough.
So I don’t know if I’ll get round to many/any more updates, but rest assured you’ll hear all the boring details after the event.
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