Daves Random Ramblings

 To those that know me, they're probably thinking "Noooo! Remember what happened to your knee!?".  To those people I say, "I'll never forget that day".  But I find that my regular route around Sheerwater has gotten stale and boring.  So I'm now branching out to other parts of Woking.  My new favourite route takes in the lake at the Goldsworth Park recreational ground. I've been running with a friend.  Well I think she's still a friend, I've been sworn at a few times as I'm being a bit of a task master.  But we're taking in the lake and its absolutely gorgeous to run around.  From my place this pond is just over 5km away so its a nice halfway point on a semi-lengthy run for me.   This entry has been edited a couple of times already as I you'll notice in one paragraph I call it a lake, then I called it a pond.  Then I renamed them both to lake, then both to pond, then I googled "difference between a pond and a lake" and am...

As my friends well know, whenever I have a challenge that I need to prepare for, then the blinkers go on and its all about that.  Not to the detriment of work mind you. Obviously I'm STILL talking about my Guildford triathlon challenge.  Out of the three disciplines, in order of my strengths from worst to best its Swimming, Running, Cycling.  So the rationale I'm applying then is to concentrate on the weakest event. Step 1 was joining the Racestrong triathlon club which I wrote about in my previous blog primarily for some swimming coaching as it makes good sense to be taught by someone that knows what they're talking about instead of thrashing about in a pool, consuming boat loads of energy and potentially not even managing the challenge.  OK I know I can manage a 500 metre swim, I just want to do it as efficiently as possible which in my head means as fast as possible, or as I now like to say "Same results for half the effort" (thank you Rob Needham for that ...

So two weekends ago I went and tried something new. I stepped up a group on the WCC main club ride and went from intermediates to intermediate / fast.  Yes they are similar in the names with "/ fast" added onto the end of the title of the new group but this group were really not messing about when it came to the speed.  A really nice, friendly bunch of guys that made this look far too easy but I suppose if that's what they normally go at then it is par for the course for them. Being the newbie in the group I was happy enough riding at the back and drafting behind them.  Moving up the pack sometimes and only once at the front which I found a tad hard because I was trying to replicate the same effort / speed as well as having to deal with the wind resistance that you dont get as much when drafting / slip streaming / hiding behind another cyclist. I did feel a little bit unsociable as they were chatting away to one another and there was the "getting to know the ...