Motormouth

This week saw the welcome return to our screens of Alan Sugar, the mighty motor of all mouths, in this year's The Apprentice.

Another sorry collection of wannabe businessmen and businesswomen. More often than not cringeworthy stuff, but great entertainment all the same which glues us to the TV screens each Wednesday evening for the next 10 or so weeks. My prediction for this year's winner is a guy called James McQuillan or, failing that, Kate Walsh (because we all know that Sugar likes a bit of blond totty!).

Another motormouth was my son, Adam, who shouted and screemed words of encouragement to his football team from the sidelines this Sunday. Less 'Man of the Match', more 'Mouth of the Match', and if you know Adam you'll know what I mean.

Adam was unable to play courtesy of a broken little finger whilst at his girlfriend's house Saturday morning, but such is his devotion to the team that he insisted that he came along to cheer them on. Actually, I think he secretly wanted everyone to see his war wounds - he does like being the centre of attention does my Adam! Anyway, his cheering must have done some good because we ended up wining 3 - 0 in a hard fought game against a team with whom we always have closely contested games.

It is fair to say that we haven't had the best of seasons, and so the few times we do win we celebrate FA Cup-style. The picture up top was taken directly after our match and the lucozade (the boys' version of Champagne) was flowing freely, I can tell you!

Son number one (as in first born), Joe, was also motormouth in his game Sunday afternoon.

'Motormouth' as in 'spouting off to the referee' motormouth, resulting in a yellow card in a grudge match against a particularly unruly and unsporting team. To be fair to Joe, he was the shining light for his team (he got Man of the Match!) and the opposition recognised this by knobbling him everytime he got the ball. It wasn't until the final ten minutes that he finally lost his rag and retaliated with some harsh and colourful words against his opposing number 8. Joe did get the last laugh though by helping his team to a 3 - 1 win. Sweet revenge!

Training is going from strength to strength. Some hard run and bike sessions (mostly intervals), and a swim, and I am a week closer to my first race of the season at Duston on 19th April. That race will be a real test of my winter running and cycling training because I can compare it with last year's time, and although my swimming has taken a back seat I figure that the time lost on the swim will be amply made up for on the bike and run (famous last words).

Here's exactly what I did last week in training ......

Monday – complete rest
Tuesday – bike - tough 2 hour interval session with Dan from the tri club, 50 press-ups and 42 sit-ups
Wednesday – bike - gym spin (fixed wheel), run - treadmill - easy 30 minutes at zero gradient, swim - 400m TT, 50 press-ups and 43 sit-ups
Thursday – run - hard intervals, 50 press-ups and 44 sit-ups
Friday - run - easy 45 minutes with Jev
Saturday – run - 90 minutes Ashridge XC with tri club, 50 press-ups and 45 sit-ups
Sunday - no training - basking in the glory of two football wins!

Next week is much of the same, but with a couple more swim sessions planned, and is the penultimate week of my sub-40 minute 10K run plan. If I can get my 400 metre swim time down to 6:30 then I will be more than pleased with that. I did 6:59 last week after a hard spin and run brick session at the gym so I reckon that 6:30 is do'able.

*WEBSITE OF THE WEEK* is http://www.motionbased.com/. I upload my training data from my Garmin 305, as do millions of other GPS users from around the world, and can do all kinds of wonderful things with the data. Truth be told, it is probably TOO powerful for my modest needs but, with an imminent tri training camp to Italy, I shall be downloading to my 305 some routes from motionbased which have been uploaded by people who have been on previous training camps there. It's handy to see where I am going and what type of sessions I will be doing, including (very usefully) the type of terrain I will be training on.

Until next week, happy training, or whatever it is you have planned.

C