SWISSMAN Xtreme Triathlon is a unique point-to-point iron-distance triathlon with a total ascent of 5400 m. The journey begins at 196 m above sea level, with a 3.8km swim in Lake Maggiore.
Transition is in the town of Ascona. The athletes cycle 180km through the Alps with three major mountain passes (the Gotthard Pass, the Furka Pass and the Grimsel Pass). This tough leg reaches an altitude of 2436m above sea level.
From the second transition in Brienz (567m), the triathletes have to run an uphill marathon to the village of Kleine Scheidegg (2061m altitude).
This is not a race for the faint-hearted. The 2016 video shows just how tough it is against a backdrop of stunning scenery and stirring music.
This year’s race will take place on 23rd June 2018. Entry is via a ballot system.
Most people will never swim a mile (64 lengths), so the thought of swimming 100 consecutive miles is incomprehensible, but that’s exactly what Sarah Thomas did in August last year. She swam further than anyone has ever swum before without the aid of currents.
What kind of dedication and training does it take to accomplish an incredible feat like this? Most days, Sarah Thomas gets up at 5am to train and swims 5-6000m before going to work. I’m not a competitive swimmer, but I swim quite a lot and I’ve only ever swum 5000m three times. However, even a strong swimmer will take over an hour to complete 5000m swimming at race pace. It took Thomas three days and nights to cover 104 miles, nonstop. She had to stay awake for 67 hours. “Not sleeping was the hardest part,” she admits.
Another part of the challenge that cannot be overlooked is the need to stay fuelled and hydrated. The crew used a long pole to pass her caffeinated energy drinks at the twice-hourly feed stops — Marathon Swimming Federation rules forbid swimmers from touching the support boat. When Thomas had had enough of sports drinks they substituted her favourite food, risotto.
Thomas is a surprisingly modest swimmer. She doesn’t seek out publicity and many of her amazing feats of endurance swim(such as 2016’s 82 mile swim) have received little press coverage. She doesn’t even have a sponsor.
The longest ever open water swim was 139.8 miles in the Adriatic by Veljko Rogosic, but his swim was current-assisted. There are currently only three swimmers who have completed “current-neutral” swims of 63 miles or more. Interesting they are all female – possibly because women have a higher percentage of body fat which helps with buoyancy and insulation. (Official open water swims do not allow wetsuits). An alternative theory is that women have increased confidence and mental strength when it comes to open water swimming and have learnt that they are able to beat men.
Thomas did so well in her challenge that she caused herself a problem – she ended up so far ahead of schedule that she finished at night instead of in daylight. This meant that strip lights had to be set up to guide her into the slipway!
When asked about her future goals, Thomas responded, “I don’t think I’ll try to swim further… there are a lot of fun and challenging swims to do between one and 104 miles.”
I’m not convinced that the imagery in this video matches up to the speech, but it’s worth listening to 🙂
“Avoid people and situations that upset you. See there are some people that know just how to push your buttons. They know just what to say, but I’m not going to expend any energy arguing with anybody. Life is too short, ladies and gentlemen, and unpredictable. I don’t want to spend my time arguing with anybody, so, I avoid situations that will get me upset. I don’t argue with people. Draw the line, ladies and gentlemen. There are certain things that we just go through life just taking. At some point, you just gotta draw the line and just say, ‘Enough is enough’. You gotta do that with yourself.”
“One negative stroke is 16 times more powerful than a positive stroke and if you have people around you who are not sensitive to who you are – and the people that can hurt you the most, ladies and gentlemen, are the people that you love. They’re the ones that you are vulnerable to, they’re the ones that can get to you and if they’re insensitive, I don’t care who they are. See, if you don’t draw the line with people, if you just let them run rampant in your life and you let things happen to you that you don’t feel good about, if you continue to allow it to happen, you won’t feel good about yourself. Your image of yourself will erode, so you’ve got to draw the line.
Why do people just go to a job where they’re miserable, day in and day out. Why do people stay together and they’re miserable? Sleeping in separate rooms or arguing as the only thing they have in common is paying the bills? Don’t talk. Don’t communicate. Don’t share anything together. Day in and day out. As short and unpredictable that life is. Being mean to each other. Why do people do that?
Known hills are preferable to strange heavens. Because it’s familiar. See life is rough, ladies and gentlemen. It’s rough and it’s scary. It’s scary growing. It’s scary taking a chance. It’s scary acting on your intuition, on your guts. It’s scary. It’s frightening. There are people that are just tolerating things right now and they’re immobilised by fear. They can see the hammer coming and they are afraid to even move, because it’s scary. To go against the dominant thinking of your family, friends and those people you associate with every day is perhaps the most difficult act of courage you will ever perform. See when you start growing, when you start changing the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you act, the way you respond to things, the way you use your time. When you start saying, ‘No, I can’t do that’, ‘Why? Are you too busy, you don’t have the time?’, ‘No, I have my own agenda.’ If people can put you on a guilt trip they will and use you and abuse you over and over and over again. You gotta draw the line. You have to draw the line on them.
Don’t go through life feeling like you’re powerless. Victims are people that are powerless. You’re not powerless; you are powerful. You direct the power in your life. Whatever your life is right now, it is a duplication of your consciousness. It’s a result of how you have decided to use your power. That’s all it is. That’s not who you are, that’s just a perverted use of your power that you aren’t satisfied with and you’ve got the power to change that, wherever you are. How I don’t know, but I know you’ve got the power to do that. But you don’t know what has happened to me. It really doesn’t matter what has happened to you. See the only thing that really matters is what are you going to do about it. That’s all that matters… that’s all that matters.
You can allow it to destroy you, or you can allow it to build you up. We never get to a level where we feel that there’s nothing else for us to do, that we’ve achieved a certain number of goals and we figure that we’re through. No, no, you don’t want to stay there and celebrate too long, like a lot of people do. They do something they consider outstanding and they go around talking about what they used to do. See, let me tell you I used to do this and I used to do that. Excuse me! Used to bes don’t make no honey. What are you doing now? You’re still here breathing. That means you’ve got some more to give. Doesn’t matter how old you are, doesn’t matter about where you are, doesn’t matter about what you have, doesn’t matter about what you’ve done. Life is about growing, is about being productive, is about stretching, is about challenging yourself. So you start looking around and decide, hey, what else do I want to do? What got me here is a time for celebration, but also a time for reflection. What got me here? What worked? What did not work? What do I need to do, to repeat, so that I can get the same kind of results in other areas of my life? If the goal is to improve my health, if the goal is to improve my relationship, if the goal is to improve my income, if the goal is to improve something in society, what is it I need to do?
Now, don’t get confused with what you do, with who you are. Don’t trip. Don’t go on some type of ego trip. I’m talking about how bad you are. None of us do anything by ourselves. Develop an appreciation for external support as well as good fortune because all of those things play a role. The other thing is don’t go overboard celebrating. You must meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same. You look at hey I did it! I feel good about that. Now you’re moving on to the next thing. Things did not work out the way you wanted them to work out, you didn’t produce the results you wanted to produce. Hey, missed that. You win some, you lose them. Next. Moving right on.
Don’t confuse who you are with what you do. Make your mind fertile ground for the seeds of opportunity. I think if you want to experience a sense of fulfilment, you’ve got to have an open mind so that ideas can come in there and take root and grow. So, part of beginning to have fertile ground you know you got to break that ground up, you gotta break up that hard crust, because if you don’t seeds will fall there and the wind can blow them away… the winds of doubt. When you’re set in your mind and you refuse to grow and you’re not open to new ideas, new methods, new ways of doing things, if your mind is already fixed, you become stagnant. You can’t grow, you can’t have a sense of fulfilment. You become extremely cynical and negative about everything. You know it all. So you want to begin to look at life and have a sense of curiosity. Not know-it-all. You want to keep learning, keep growing, realise that we have a theme. You never find out how much you know until you find out how little you know. There are some people you can’t tell anything – they have all the answers. “I’ve already done that”. So many of us count ourselves out of things prematurely. You don’t know what the possibilities are up in there, so you want to be open. You want to continue to learn. You want to continue to grow. You want to begin to know that there are unlimited ideas out here waiting for you to latch onto them and if you don’t take advantage of them when they come your way because you’re so close minded do understand somebody else will. We’ve all had ideas that we did not act on and looked around and somebody else had the idea and gone with it. So, be open and receptive. Become involved in life.
Live your fantasy! Most people go through life not living their fantasy. Going sitting up in the bleachers, looking out on the field, looking out into the arena, wishing that they were down there, just fantasising seeing themselves running with the ball. Decide to live your fantasy. See in life you can go through life, you can come up with reasons or you can come up with results; you can come up with excuses or you can come up with achievement. You can go through life blaming or you can come up with solutions. The choice’s in your hand: satisfaction or despair, we can choose that. So, look at your life and decide what it is that you want to do that will give your life a sense of worth.
Someone said your life worth is measured by your accomplishments and not by your complaints. Want to have a fulfilling life? Decide not to make your life predictable. Some people, their lives are very predictable. They got a little routine they do, that they follow that day in and day out. Day in and day out. You don’t get much juice and happiness out of life like that. If you’re predictable you want to change it up. Variety most certainly is the spice of life.
Here’s something else. Want to create a greater sense of fulfilment? Challenge your fears. Challenge them! Look those fears in the face and take them on. Don’t allow them to rule you. Decide that you’re going to take some chances. You’ve got to be willing to risk. If you’re not willing to risk, you can’t grow in life. Life has no power when you’re not willing to risk it. It’s said to laughs is to risk appearing the fool, to weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement. To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair. To try is to risk failure… but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love and live. Chained by their certitudes they are a slave. They have forfeited their freedom. Only a person who risks is free!
Hands up if you’ve been watching any of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang…
Assuming I’ve read the schedule correctly then the women’s bobsleigh starts tomorrow and it’s inspiring to hear that Mica McNeill and Mica Moore will be taking part.
Mica McNeill has been part of the British Bobsleigh programme since 2010, but even though she has been consistently competing at a high level last year the British Bobsliegh and Skeleton Association withdrew funding for McNeill and Moore. The women managed to crowdfund enough money to compete during the 2017-18 Bobsleigh season. The results earned them a place in Pyeongchang.
At this time of year, I start thinking about my impending birthday. It was 5 years ago that I started my journey to becoming a swimmer (and a triathlete).
This year, my journey continues, with various goals, including becoming a Personal Trainer.
What are you doing to unleash your inner beginner?
So we’re nearly a month into 2018 and many people who subscribe to the ‘New year, new you!’ philosophy, but simply wish for change aren’t making it happen.
Did you make any New Year’s Resolutions? How are they going? Did you plan ahead and have a clear goal? Depending on your long-term goal, you may need to break it into a series of short-term goals to make it achievable. You should also make your goals SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Achieveable
Realistic
Time-based
A great example of someone who set a SMART goal and followed it through in 2017 is the former GB 1500m international runner Colin McCourt.
McCourt had retired after failing to make the London Olympics in 2012. In the intervening period, he put on weight, rising to almost 15 stone (210lbs/95kg).
After seeing an old photo of himself in his international vest, he couldn’t believe how much he had changed. It prompted discussion with some of his old running buddies and he took a bet in 2017 that he could run under 16 minutes for 5k within a year. The forfeit would be to tattoo the names of his 17 friends who laid the bet on his body. Or if he accomplished the feat he would collect a tidy £100 from each. This was no easy feat. His last recorded run had been a 24 minute parkrun in early 2016.
With the added pressure of his journey being documented through social media and an on-line blog, there was no escape. Yet, on Saturday 18 November, Colin McCourt did it. He clocked 15:38 at a race in Burnley to bring a happy ending to the tale.
After reaching his goal, he told Athletics Weekly: “In eight months I’ve gone from a 24-minute 5km runner to a 15:38 5km runner. It has been a mental year. It just shows that if you can just run and do little sessions and tempos, you can take it to the next level if you want to. It’s just believing in yourself and doing it.”
McCourt’s next challenge is to try to break 2:30 for the marathon – follow his progress on Instagram.
I recently saw this trailer and was really inspired by it. I hope that I’ll get a chance to see to see this film.
When a criminal court judge starts a running club on LA’s notorious skid row and begins training a motley group of addicts and criminals to run marathons, lives begin to change.
SKID ROW MARATHON follows four runners as they rise from the mean streets of LA to run marathons around the world, fighting the pull of homelessness and addiction at every turn.
Their story is one of hope, friendship, and dignity.
One of the defendants whom Judge Mitchell sentenced to prison approached him after his release. He asked the Judge to visit him at the Midnight Mission homeless shelter where he was living. After the visit, the Judge decided to start a running club. He thought that if he could get few of these men and women into shape and run marathons, the benefits would cross over into their personal lives. He promises those who stick with the program and stay clean, a free trip to run in an international marathon.
The Judge, who suffers from a painful spinal condition, has been told by his doctors to stop running. He chooses to ignore their advice. He needs the club and the balance it provides in his life. It gives him the opportunity to change the world in a way that he can’t in his own courtroom.
There aren’t many sports teams with seemingly as low entry requirements as the San Diego Splash Sisters: “If you can stand up and move your legs, you’re welcome.” However, when you realise that this hoops squad consists of over 80s, then that definitely limits the number of potential players.
I was completely inspired by these fantastic women and hope you are too.
It’s a very short Monday Morning Motivation this week…
Supermodel Gisele Bundchen knows what it means to live under the microscope, amongst the noise of contradicting opinions. But will beats noise. Watch Gisele face real-time commentary now at: http://willbeatsnoise.com/
Schuyler Bailar’s story is inspirational – he gave up the opportunity to be an Olympic medalist to be true to himself. He was recruited to Harvard as a female, but has found peace after transitioning to male. I hope that over the next few years he achieves success in all areas of his life.
In 2016, the International Olympic Committee ruled that transgender athletes could compete without undergoing surgery. This policy made history in the sports world, welcoming a new generation of athletes into the Olympic family.
Schuyler Bailar is an athlete on the men’s swimming and diving team at Harvard University. This is his story.
Schuyler: I’ve just always loved being underwater.
Schuyler: When I jump in, the water’s always cold, and it kind of shocks my system into, like, being quiet for a second. Sometimes I just kind of stay underwater for like a second too long, and it’s always that kind of moment of, “This is the only thing I’m supposed to be doing right now. This is the only place I need to be.” That brings me a lot of peace, I think, that I don’t have in my daily life.
Baltimore, Maryland
Terry Hong, Schuyler’s mother: OK, who wants tea?
Schuler and Gregor Bailar, Schuyler’s father: Tea, I want tea. I’ll have some, please.
Terry: OK.
Gregor: What kind of tea?
Terry: It’s green tea.
Schuyler: That’s when you took my braids out, right?
Terry: That was in West Virginia.
Gregor: Schuyler’s swimming started in the bathtub.
Terry: He was just always so comfortable in the water, and before he learned to walk he was swimming on his own.
Video footage: Go Schuyler!
Schuyler: I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of myself as a talented swimmer. When I was younger, I wasn’t very good. There were a lot of people who were bigger and stronger than me, but I’ve always worked hard.
Schuyler on video, age 12: This is my bird Chico. I’m Schuyler, this is Jinwon…
Gregor: Schuyler was a tomboy. He was much more comfortable in cargo pants and a T-shirt than anything else.
Schuyler: People handed me skirts, and I would throw on basketball shorts. Or, like, people handed me the word “girl”, and I would hand them back “tomboy”. It wasn’t like I thought about it a whole lot, until it became a thing that people said, “Oh, like Schuyler’s different,” or, “Schuyler doesn’t do other things other girls do,” and then it became conscious to me because I was like, “If I do these things, people are going to see me as a boy. OK, I’m going to keep doing them.”
Schuyler: When I was younger and my coach told me I could be good, and my mom and I were watching the Olympics that same year, I watched all of the women swimmers at that point, and their chests were really flat, and this was the point where my breasts had started growing, and I remember being like, “Mom, how come they don’t have any boobs?” and Mom was like, “Well, when you exercise that hard, like a lot of female Olympians don’t have boobs, because they don’t have enough fat in their body,” and I was like, “Oh, my God. This is incredible!”
Schuyler: At that point, that was a huge fear of mine because I knew that my body was about to be kind of taken from me in a way that I didn’t want it to, and so there was definitely a huge point in my thought process where I was like, “OK, I’m going to be good at swimming.”
Gregor: Schuyler’s swimming career kind of took off in high school… and he started breaking records both in the local area as well as at the national level on a relay team.
Schuyler: I think when I was younger I was intent on doing things because I liked them, but I got lost in high school, and started just doing things because I wanted to do well in them.
Gregor: Schuyler broke his back the summer before his junior year, and junior year is recruiting year for swimming, and so it was actually quite emotional.
Schuyler: Up until that point, I had used swimming as my everything. It was my release. It was my pleasure. It was my social life. It was my motivation. It was my… my day. It was definitely a way to block everything else out. Breaking my back broke me. I fell so far into depression, eventually an eating disorder, um, and a lot of it was because I didn’t have another way to release anything, and I didn’t know how to deal with my own feelings. I had never had to sit down and really think about who I was or what I wanted out of the world. I didn’t have any words to explain why I felt so uncomfortable with my body, and the biggest thing was that I did have everything I needed. I was doing really well in school. I had just gotten recruited to swim at Harvard, and I had gotten accepted into Harvard. I had made the National Age Group record. I was swimming fast, and I was like, “What is wrong with me?”
Gregor: There was no gender discussion, by the way, at that time. It was just all about, um, getting to know who he was and getting to fix some of these issues, and we found a facility that seemed to be a match with that.
Terry: He graduated, and then the day after, we went to Florida where we took Schuyler into the facility where he would spend 131 days, and he did a lot of really difficult work there and… started the process of becoming whole.
Schuyler: At treatment you’re not allowed to do any behaviours. They keep a very close watch on you, so I literally had zero ways to cope, and had to talk about my feelings, and had to talk about how I felt and my identity, and that was the first place that I was finally able to say that I was transgender.
Schuyler on video, aged 18: Hey, guys. Um, so I’m Schuyler. I’m about to start my physical transition. Um, FTM, female to male. Er, and I thought that it would be good to document it.
Schuyler: It took me another year until I told most of my friends, and asked them to call me male pronouns, and refer to me as a boy, and kind of solidify the idea of like, “Oh, this has actually always been me, and I’m not actually, you know, changing myself. I’m just presenting the truest part of myself.”
Schuyler on video, aged 18: I’m going to be swimming next year in college. Um, so that makes it complicated because I want to transition as soon as possible, but you can’t swim competitively and take hormones. So what I’m gonna do… ..er, is get top surgery. So I…
Schuyler: When I was allowed to have top surgery, it was probably one of the best days of my life.
Schuyler on video, aged 18: You kind of see that, you know, they’re there. I hate that.
Surgeon: Let’s take a look in the mirror, OK? So, big difference.
Schuyler: Yeah.
Surgeon: You can see…
Schuyler: I thought that it was going to be me transitioning, and being true to being trans, or me being true to me being a swimmer, and that was really hard because I thought, you know, “Both of these are me.”
Terry: It was an agonising decision for Schuyler to consider giving up everything he had worked for his whole life, in terms of his swimming. It was really hard to realise, “Oh, I’m not maybe going to be this champion swimmer that I thought I was going to be, that everyone told me I was going to be.”
Coach Kevin, Harvard Men’s Swimming and Diving: I first heard of Schuyler through Stephanie Morawski. She’s our women’s head coach of swimming and diving. Stephanie and I had been talking about Schuyler, and some of the issues that Schuyler had outside of swimming. Once we got to a point where Schuyler was thinking of transitioning from female to male, Steph kept me in the loop as far as that was concerned. I did work to educate myself as far as NCAA rules. We found out that it was perfectly acceptable for Schuyler to compete for Harvard Men’s Swimming and Diving. I had conversations with the young men on the team, and everybody was open to the idea.
Schuyler: The men’s coach was like, “Well, if Schuyler identifies as male, and I have a men’s team, and he wants to swim, why doesn’t he swim for me?” But I almost said no because I was so scared of the possibility of losing everything, because, yeah, I’d be able to swim, but I would transition, and my body would be different, and I would lose all of my accolades as a female athlete, and all the potential I had as a female athlete. That was really scary to me because I had worked really hard to be successful at swimming. At that point, I decided, “OK, I’ve got to take this risk. I’ve got to try to be myself because maybe that will make me happy.”
Coach: On your mark, go!
Coach: You’re doing a better job not slowing down in your turns, but let’s get a bit wider in the foot placement for both you guys.
Coach: Schuyler is one of the most determined athletes I’ve ever met in my life.
Schuyler: Hey, Matt, will you start me?
Coach: Not only as a swimmer but, more importantly, he’s an exceptional human being and a really good team-mate. The grit and determination that he’s shown is remarkable, and it’s helped me not only become a better coach, but a better parent and hopefully a better educator at Harvard.
Coach: Your best swimmers have that feeling that this is something they can’t live without, and I think Schuyler can’t live without being in the water.
Schuyler: Five years ago, swimming meant 100%, unequivocally, everything to me. I think over time, I’ve learned to have a bit more balance than that. My family has never shown me a lack of love, and that has been what’s kind of kept me alive. When I ended up biting the bullet and telling my very conservative Korean grandma, she said, “Schuyler, you can be a son. You can be a brother. You can be a husband. You can be a boy, a man, but Korean daughters take care of their mothers, and now your mom doesn’t have any daughters so you have to take care of your mother and your parents,” and I was like, “OK. I can definitely do that.” I have those words – take care of your parents – tattooed on my side, under my scar, next to my heart in my grandmother’s handwriting. She wrote it for me for the tattoo, and she was very excited about it. “Thank you for taking this eternal vow for your parents.”
Terry: I don’t remember the Baltimore harbour like this.
Gregor: Let’s get a picture over here.
Schuyler: Picture?
Gregor: Of us three.
Schuyler: Got it.
Gregor: OK, let’s keep walking.
Terry: Let’s keep walking.
Gregor: Keep walking before we freeze.
Schuyler: When I came out as trans, and when I decided to swim for the men’s team, I told people around me, my coaches, my parents, my friends, that I was going to be open about it. When I was younger, I had no role models or people to look up to and say, “Oh, I can do this.”
National Association of Independent Schools Congress
Schuyler: I love motivational speaking because I’m really invested in sharing my story, and sharing the possibility for this kind of happiness and this kind of peace with yourself, especially with something so complicated as being transgender, but also so simple as just wanting to be happy.
Administrator: Hello.
Host: Yeah, um, Schuyler Bailar. He’s a speaker.
Host: In so many ways, Schuyler’s story represents the stories of the remarkable young people whom we all teach on our campuses, but his story has a unique distinction. As the first openly transgender athlete to compete in any sport on an NCAA division one team, he has been willing to share his story globally. His willingness to share his insights are why we are so pleased he is with us today, and I ask you to join me in welcoming Schuyler Bailar.
Schuyler: Thank you so much, everybody. I’m so happy to be here. I’ve spoken at high schools and middle schools, elementary schools, and colleges, but I’ve never actually spoken with just administrators before so this is really cool. Allowing me to be myself at every step of the way from my coaches, my teachers, my parents, has saved my life, and it’s why I’m here today. I want to just take you back to when I was a kid. I was always a water baby. I’ve swum since the time I could walk.
Schuyler: Swimming has been the hugest part of my life since before I can remember, and being true to myself as a trans person is also hugely important to me. When I used to interact with somebody, it was always, “Who are they going to think I am?” And now I just walk into the room, and I’m just myself. If I can be naked in a Speedo and expose my trans-ness to everybody, you can do your thing too.
Triathlete | Blogger | Running Coach & Fitness Instructor
Ambassador: SOAS Racing
* Winfields Best Outdoor Bloggers 2018
* 2018 Running Awards nominee
* Naked Nutrition Top Fitness Bloggers 2017
* Winfields Best Outdoor Blogs 2017
* Feedspot Top 200 Running Blogs 2016
* Wimi Fitness 50 Best Women's Running Blogs August 2016
* Vuelio Top 10 UK Sports Blogs July 2016
* UK Blog Awards 2016 Best Health & Social Care blog nominee
* UK Blog Awards 2016 Best Lifestyle blog nominee
* Blogging Edge UK Sports Blogger of the Year 2015
* Bloggers' Lounge Health and Fitness Blogger of the Year 2015
As an overweight couch potato, I decided to turn my life around. I lost over 2.5 stone and now love keeping fit and healthy. In February 2013, I set myself a five year challenge to complete an iron-distance triathlon (2.4 mile/3.8k swim; 112 mile/180k bike; 26.2 mile/42.2k run).
Swimming: In the past 3 years, I've learnt to swim and completed a 17.5km swim around the Isles of Scilly in 2015. I've been chosen to be an ambassador for Swimathon in 2017.
Cycling: I cycle to work every day and am a Breeze cycling champion. I have a British Cycling Ride Leader Award level 1. In 2015, I supported the YMCA Tour de Y nearly 400 miles from Lake Windermere to London over 4 days. I've also cycled across the Japanese Alps and conquered various Cols (including Col D'Aspin and Peyresourde). I completed a 100 mile charity bike ride in 2016 whilst over 5 months pregnant.
Running: I'm a Run Director at Southampton parkrun, one of the largest parkruns in the UK. I'm also a UK Coach in Running Fitness. I ran throughout my pregnancy, completing parkrun on my due date in 30 minutes.
I've completed two half iron distance triathlons and train with Southampton Tri Club and SUTRI.
As well as swimming, cycling and running, I enjoy yoga and weight training. I've achieved a black belt in karate and competed in the British Teamgymnastics Championships.
Fat Girl to Ironman 