WEEKEND WARRIOR
Brunty lists the ‘Six Ps’ for an organised tri… and ignores them
Prior planning and preparation, the old saying goes, prevents poor performance. The ‘Six Ps’ is a lesson that most triathletes would do well to heed because there’s a lot of ‘stuff’ associated with triathlon which needs thinking about before you plunge into the icy wastes of the swim leg.
For example, for several days before your race you’ll need to start thinking about all the kit you need to take with you. In Ironmans, this all needs to be stowed in bags, which adds an extra layer of complication and tension with packing, unpacking, repacking, unpacking, repacking again and so on, depending how nervous you are. Frankly it’s a miracle any of us make the start line – by which I mean frankly it’s a miracle that I make the start line, because planning and preparedness are not my forté.
By way of example, let me take you back to 1998 and the first sort-of triathlon I ever did. The Snowdonia Challenge involved a canoe across Lake Padarn, a mountain bike ride around Snowdonia, and a run up and down Snowdon. My preparation for this, as well as involving absolutely no training, included never having canoed in my life, digging my unused bike out of the shed the night before heading to Wales, and doing the run (walk) in a pair of toetector boots because I didn’t possess any trail shoes. At the finish line, I had blisters so big they looked like the last remaining balloon at a children’s party.
Fast forward to 2002 when I finished the London Marathon after doing absolutely zero training and wearing a pair of trainers I’d bought from JJB a week before. Or better still to my first ‘proper’ triathlon in 2003 in London when I took to the start line having never swum in open water before, clad in a hired wetsuit I’d never worn before, riding a bike I’d borrowed off my brother-in-law, wearing toe-clips I’d never tried before, and running in the same pair of JJB trainers which I hadn’t worn since the marathon.
In the intervening 15 years, with who knows how many races under my belt, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Well you’d be wrong, because as I write this I am literally two days away from embarking on another highly optimistic test of my fitness/painmanagement skills having left all my paltry preparations to the last possible moment.
The race in question is called the Devon Coast Challenge and involves running three marathons in three days along the north Devon coast path from Combe Martin to I-don’tknow-where because I haven’t particularly studied the maps. As well as not knowing exactly where I’m going, I’ve not recced the course at all. In fact, I don’t know Devon at all, mostly because my longsuffering wife Nicky is Cornish and Devon is apparently a place to be hastened through on your way to Cornwall because it’s full of hessian-clad yokels who put their jam and cream on their scones the wrong way round.
The ‘paltry preparations’ I have done have mostly involved borrowing a running backpack off my friend after finally reading the race instructions and seeing that I needed to carry a load of guff with me, like a compass, torch, waterproofs, maps, etc. which, if I tried to pack them all into my running belt, would make me look like Saturn. I’ve also just found a campsite for my campervan, which is a few miles away because the one at the Race HQ is full, giving me a nice extra journey at the end of each day’s running.
I have, to be fair, been doing a fair bit of running, but doing so has given me patella tendonitis (note use of medical term to make it sound more serious than ‘bad knee’) and a pulled calf, sustained in a notremotely-helpful 10k race a few weeks ago. I’m therefore being quite literally held together with kinesio tape, fear, a bad attitude and painkillers, which have turned my body into a machine which converts expensive pharmaceuticals into brightly coloured urine.
Still, what’s the worst that can happen?! If you never hear from me again, just remember the Six Ps!
“As well as not knowing where I’m going, I’ve not recced the race course at all”