What's your biggest challenge?

One of the things I like best about triathlon and endurance sport is that there is always some sort of challenge that needs to be faced and solved... or endured, at least. The physical challenges are, of course, the most obvious examples; however, often more difficult are the mental challenges that swimming, biking and running can throw up. Then, maybe toughest of all, are the logistical challenges.

You have an early meeting but need to fit in an hour on the bike…

You need to pack swim kit, work clothes, running gear and a change of clothes to meet some friends for a drink and need to get it all into one bag…

You have a brick session – an early long ride (likely to be cold) followed by a medium distance run (likely to be hot by then); how many changes of kit, water bottles, sports drinks, energy gels and bananas do you need to get you through and where will you keep them..?

To me, triathlon often seems like less of an endurance sport and more of a complex puzzle.

While living in Dubai, the toughest equation to solve often involved the year’s biggest races being in or around summer when temperatures in the UAE were tipping over from ‘Megan Fox’ to ‘Jessica Alba’ on the hotness scale (which is way more fun than a thermometer). Therefore, the solution to the training quandary often involved very early mornings, pre-frozen water bottles and cooler boxes left in the car.

Ahhhh... let's just take a minute here... OK, carry on reading.

Recently, I’ve been faced with a completely different problem:

The cold is an issue, of course – especially where cycling is concerned – but the bigger problem is that it has snowed two or three times in the past week or so, without once getting out of minus temperatures, so you can imagine how precarious the roads, bike paths and pavements are at the moment.

This doesn’t matter too much for cycling – it’s still very early in the season and a few half hours here and there on the home trainer will do the trick for now – however, having begun my training for the Rotterdam Marathon, it most definitely does affect my running.

And, so, I’ve had to hit the gym – an obvious solution, maybe, but I have always had a hate-hate-hate relationship with the treadmill. After 10 minutes, I’m bored senseless. But the training schedule says what it says and won’t wait for the roads to dry and temperatures to rise and so, yesterday, I headed for the gym ably supported by my MP3 player and an iPad with a couple of shows on it and, for the first time, I blasted out a steady half marathon (21.1kms) on the treadmill.

And this is where the logistical, the physical and the mental all collide – OK, it was just a mid-paced training run but I managed to knock out almost two hours on the treadmill – my sworn enemy! – and the motivation and positive energy I got from achieving that were enormous. Life threw me a curve ball, and I adapted and just got her done – winning the logistical, physical and mental battles all at once. And that, as much as anything, is what triathlon training is all about. While everyone else says "I think I'll skip my run/gym visit today", we just have to man (or woman) up and get 'er done. 

And, to my mind at least, this is a pretty good lesson to apply to life on the whole.