Habits
I managed to sleep in two mornings this week. A sleep in is only sleeping in to 5.30 or 6am. Every other day the alarm goes off at 4.30am. Now that it’s dark at 5.15am it  just seems a little harder to get up. Even though the temperatures are still very mild.
The local swimming pool heaters have just been turned on. The water is still 25-26 C, but it’s more fuel efficient to keep it there than to let it drop and try to warm it up. The average pool swimmer …

My week started out very well. I have had my old windtrainer bike which is fitted with Power Cranks in the back shed for months. I have decided it’s time to drag it out from behind all of the junk which accumulates in a garden shed. The bike travel cases, the spare washing machine, the surfboards and kids bikes (the old ones which they don’t use any more).
The Power Cranks really help to improve cycling efficiency. Being a ratchet type device which allows each crank to move independantly from the other. …

I often advise athletes not to start their Kona build-up until 16 weeks before race day. It’s very difficult to hold the mental side of the training together for longer than 16 weeks. I have seen a lot of guys crack mentally when they still have 4-5 weeks to go. They just don’t want to get out of bed.
There could be lots of different reasons for this. But experience has shown me that the ideal build-up is around sixteen weeks. This will be my twelfth Hawaii Ironman, so I do know …

I did say get what you expect, not what you want.
So often I hear people say, “I knew that would happen”. When something goes wrong. Deep down, athletes sometimes really don’t believe that they are capable of achieving their goals. It’s like their mouth has spoken the goals but their heart doesn’t own them.
The concept of self sabotage is very real. Very often it’s so subtle it’s usually treated as “bad luck”. But sadly some people have all the “bad luck”, and it’s just when they didn’t need it. At the …