A blog post that saves lives and money

There are a lot of things to consider when you move countries and continents. And you can get so caught up with unimportant stuff, like packing, closing and opening bank accounts, new apartment to live in yadda, yadda, yadda, that it becomes easy to overlook the truly important training-related to-dos.

Last week, almost three months since I made the move to Amsterdam, I finally got around to what should be - no, seriously, it should - one of the first things an athlete needs to do when they make such a move: order my new Road ID.

If you don't know what a Road ID is, it's this:

Essentially, a velcro bracelet that you wear for all your activities, containing vital information and contact numbers.  On mine, for example, it says my name, the year I was born, my girlfriend and parents' contact numbers (obviously, they're not blurred out on the real thing!), that I have no known allergies, asthma and have AB+ blood type, and there's even room for a little motivational message to read when you look down during a hard session. Many people have "don't quit" or "pain doesn't exist" type slogans but I prefer the last line of The Streets' great tune, Turn The Page, which is my pre-race anthem.

As many of my triathlon buddies back in Dubai have witnessed of late, in the terrible case of an accident while out biking or running, you could be left unconscious and this type of information - who you are, blood type, allergies etc - could well be critical. As could the support of your loved ones. It's almost irresponsible to train without one of these bad boys on your wrist.

They're only pretty cheap - less than US$20 - plus, if you use the code ThanksMatt22236291 you'll get a dollar off. Can't say fairer than that. This isn't a sales pitch, I'm not sponsored by Road ID, or anything like that... I just think that, as cyclists, runners or triathletes, we sometimes take safety for granted. This is just one of a couple of very simple and cheap steps we can take to limit the risks of racing and training, as going out in a group or run buddy isn't always possible.

The clothes make the man – in triathlon at least

There are loads of sayings and little snippets of advice that involve the threads we wear. “The clothes make the man,” “Dress to impress,” “Wolf in sheep’s clothing,” “The emperor’s new clothes,” “Dressed to kill,” and “Dress for the job you want, not the one you’ve got”…

I’ve always had a bit of a basic, whatever-fits approach to training and working out attire but, over the past couple of years, that has changed significantly.

It was 18 months or so ago, at a big race, that I was chatting to a really top age grouper (sub-9 hour IM guy, it turned out). We were both smugly ridiculing the hundreds of all-the-gear-and-no-idea racers who, by the looks of them, had spent more time shopping at the expo than doing any training; the result being that they all now looked the same – same warm-up pants, same ‘cool’ jacket, same branded visor…

I mentioned to the guy I was chatting to (Norweigan fella, if that helps you paint the picture more clearly) that I just tended to grab any old crap in sports shop sales and mix and match for training. “No, no, no, Matt – that won’t do at all!” he said to me completely seriously, before dishing out the triathlon sartorial advice that I now follow without question (with one exception but that’s coming up…).

His advice was that you should have one or two sets of good quality swim gear, bike wear, and run kit. You don’t need all the fancy track suits, triathlon t-shirts, race visors… you don’t need a wardrobe that looks like a rainbow threw up I it, stuffed with 20 different TdF team bike kits. But one or two good, good quality changes for each sport.

This wasn’t to look good. This wasn’t about saving money (although, ultimately, once I started buying one good pair of bike bib shorts rather than 5 sets of cheap, rubbish shorts, I did save money in the long-term). The reasoning went a little something like this:

·         If you dress like a cyclist, you’ll be treated like a cyclist

·         If you’re treated like a cyclist, you’ll feel like a cyclist

·         If you feel like a cyclist, you’ll train and ride like a cyclist

·         If you train and ride like a cyclist, you’ll become a better triathlete

(Obviously, the same applies to swimming and running too.)

I also find that this process has helped me mentally. When I head to a run workout now, I dress and feel like a runner and, therefore, I push myself to compete with other runners, rather than thinking “well, hey, I’m a triathlete so I don’t have to be quite as good as the rest of these guys…”

With all this in mind, here are some simple tips to get you started:

·         When you wear your goggles around your neck before or after a swim session, you might be thinking “useful and won’t lose them” but all the swimmers are thinking “tool”.

·         ­Unless you’re an Olympic hopeful in the pool or are clocking 25km or more a week in an ITU-style training schedule, the above applies to taking flippers to the pool.

·         Tri suits are for tri races – not bike rides.

·         Tri suits are for tri races – not running races.

But there’s more to this than not looking like an idiot and improving your training. You see, the proper sport-specific kit is almost always the best and most comfortable thing to wear.

As I said earlier, I’ve been sticking rigidly to this ‘dress for the occasion’ principle now for a good 18 months. Except once: my first bike ride after moving to Amsterdam.

I knew it was cold, a little wet – certainly different conditions to those I was used to experiencing in Dubai. But I didn’t need any of those fancy, expensive winter biking clothes, I decided – with all their waterproof this and windproof that. I layered up with what I had, put on a pair of woolly mittens and headed out for what proved to be 90 of the most unpleasant and painful minutes that I can remember. By the time it started raining – and we were a bit lost and 45 minutes at least from home – I’d decided that crawling under a tree to have a little cry would be the best course of action; however, my hands were too cold to actually press on the brakes to stop, so I just had to keep pedalling.

Before: a bit cold

The next time I went out, my road bike was sporting mud guards and I was kitted out in shoe covers, fleece-lined long bike knicks, a proper windproof jacket (with waterproof in the back pocket) and windproof and waterproof lobster claw cycling gloves. The 2 hour ride was a cosy delight.

After: wrapped up, toasty and ready to ride.

Lesson learned - being unsuitably attired is not a mistake I will be making again. It’s not vanity, it’s not showing-off – it’s just the best way to make sure you don’t end your ride weeping under a big tree…

Wacky races - 2013 race schedule

One of the biggest advantages of having moved back to Europe - other than hot chocolate on a cold day, and, y'know, actual culture and trees and stuff - is that there are so many events to choose from. With that in mind, over these winter months when snowfall, sub-zero temperatures and 4pm sunsets have made summer triathlons feel a long way away, I've diligently gone about building my race schedule for the year ahead. 

I've mentioned on numerous occasions that Dubai was a wonderful place to discover triathlon but, due to the 12 months a year schedule if you're doing a big summer race, it also had its drawbacks.

With those drawbacks in mind, this year's race schedule (my first ever European summer schedule) looks a lot like this:

10 Feb - Schoorl Half Marathon

10 March - The Hague Half Marathon

14 April - Rotterdam Marathon

11 May - Rat Race Dirty Weekend

16 June - Berlin Ironman 70.3

14 September - Challenge Almere-Amsterdam (half iron distance)

As well as these, there are a couple of bike sportives I'll tackle in spring, there's a canal swim race in Amsterdam at the end of summer, and there are a few local sprint tris I'll do either individually or for my Tri Club (draft-legal... should be fun!) but, essentially, they'll all be parts of the build for the bigger events.

It's a schedule I'm excited about for a variety of reasons. Firstly, in spite of having done a couple of full Ironmans, I've never done a half IM so looking forward to trying a couple of those. Secondly, as I wrote in my 10 triathlon resolutions for 2013, I wanted to try something different and exciting this year and the Rat Race Dirty Weekend (the world's biggest ever obstacle course - 200 obstacles over 20 miles!) is certainly that.

Significantly, it's the sort of season I didn't manage in Dubai where I feel I just trained continually and maybe looked to peak once during the summer for an Ironman. This summer, I'll look to peak for the Rotterdam Marathon, Berlin 70.3 and the Half Challenge Almere-Amsterdam - my A races that are all nicely spaced out. Thanks to this, as well as the weather, it also means that during the early season I can focus on my run (my weakest discipline) like I never have before, while swimming and cycling take a back seat for a while before being picked up in the spring.

Finally, I feel like it's a schedule that's going to help me see some significant improvements as I build up for another Ironman in 2014 and look to shatter my 10.59 in Austria. I might be wrong - it could turn out that I'm just the kind of athlete who benefits from 3 swims, 3 bikes, 3 runs a week all year round, but I don't feel like that's going to be the case. Best of all, it's a schedule that has me super motivated and just champing at the bit to get out there and start racing again. It's been a while...

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.

So far so good...

Well then, it’s been just over a month since I made the big move, said Du-bye to Dubai and Hola to Holland, and so far so good. I have to admit that I miss my friends and training groups back in Dubai, of course, but I’m absolutely convinced that it was the right move at the right time. I like that I left Dubai on a high (no Dutch jokes here) and while things were still good – my memories of the UAE now will always be positive, and I’ll definitely be trying to get back for occasional visits.

And what of Amsterdam? Well, the obvious thing first – it’s bloody cold, but, other than on a couple of occasions (more of those later), that’s not bothered me so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent most of the past decade living in Spain and the UAE, but I’m kind of enjoying the novelty of an actual, real winter. Coats, gloves, cappuccinos, hot chocolates and oliebollen… winter has its advantages. And for every mind-blowingly crappy day, there are days – like today – when the sky is blue, the cold is crisp and the leaves are on the ground… it really is beautiful.

Amsterdam

I really feel like I’m finding my way in the city/country now. I have my bank account and citizen’s number, so I’m official. I really like our apartment and the area it’s in too. The first few weeks maybe felt like a bit of a extended holiday but now it’s real life doing real things (with the exception of the working from home everyday part).

And, while Dubai had its advantages, I’m really lapping up all of the proper ‘European’ things on offer in the Netherlands. The parks and canals, stopping in cafes for beers and bitterballen (the Dutch, it seems, have a strange but tasty obsession with food in ball shapes!), heading to small art house cinemas (Pretentious? Moi?) and just wandering or cycling around the streets to discover new places and see new things.

We’ve visited Glow in Eindhoven – a cool, week-long art experiment when the buildings become light shows. We have tickets to a couple of festivals and music events next summer. There are weekend breaks planned. Gigs to be watched. And I haven’t even gotten around to seeing the museums, markets, the Heineken Experience or the pancake boat yet! But all in good time…

Images from GLOW in Eindhoven

But this isn’t some fancy-Dan (or fancy-Dam…groan!) travel blog or expat relocation guide, is it? It is, or at least it tries to be, about triathlon. So, how’s that going?

Well, we live in a great place as far as training goes. Firstly, we’re between a few parks, all of which have run tracks around or through them. I can do a lap or two for short runs while they can be combined (usually by following a canal or two) to create longer runs. There’s even an official 22km trail through three of the parks, while the nearby Amsterdam Woods (I’ve not been there yet) has 12, 15 and 21km trails through it. I’ve also tried a city run and a run down the Amstel river – after the same one or two loops of Dubai, this feels like an embarrassment of riches. Especially when the backdrop is misty parks, canals with ducks, geese and herons perched nearby, and woodlands with a thick carpet of autumn leaves underfoot.

The Vondelpark has a nice 3.5km run loop

Came across these dudes while running along the nearby Nieuwe Meer (the lake is pictured below) 

The local 22km loop - we basically live right in the centre of this

Running has been the main focus just to keep a little fit for the time being. I’ve ridden twice – once a couple of weekends back while visiting my fried Joe in Spain, we headed out and did a nice 90km jaunt through the hills of Andalucia, stopping only to experience the ‘traditional delicacies’ of the world’s worst tapas restaurant. And then, last week, I tried a ride here with Hamish, who also recently moved to Amsterdam.

At this point, I should explain that I only began the whole riding/triathlon thing in Dubai so cold conditions have never really featured too heavily. Expecting it to be cold out, I dressed in my warmest cycling gear – the sort of thing I’d wear for a cold winter morning in Dubai. Turns out that there’s quite a difference between a cold Dubai winter morning and a cold Amsterdam winter afternoon… we only made 45km in the end as the heavens opened and sent a downpour; I, of course, had absolutely no waterproof clothing on.  To cut a long story short, I had to get a neighbour to let me into the apartment as I couldn’t use the keys, so cold were my hands, and it took me 25 minutes of being inside before they thawed enough to take my gloves or shoes off.

Anyway, never one to need telling twice, I remedied that situation by immediately going online and buying proper winter cycling gear. Of course, I haven’t ridden since!

My favourite place for training is called Sloterpark. It has a +6km mainly woodland run track around a giant lake. Being around 1.5km from the apartment, this makes a perfect 10km run. Better still, on the far side of the lake – around 10 mins bike away – is a giant sports centre with a 50m swim pool. This is home to the De Dolfijn Masters and Tri Clubs. It’s also where my awesome gym is located. Just over the road is the running track where the tri club holds weekly track workouts. During the summer, you can do open water swims in the lake. Oh, and there’s a pretty good annual triathlon in this area too. I love having all of this so close to hand.

Running in the Sloterpark

Canalside path leading from home to Sloterpark 

The lake at Sloterpark

Triathlon is a pretty expensive sport, but it’s much more accessible here in Europe. De Dolfijn Tri, for example, costs €365 a year, which can be paid in monthly instalments (and includes an annual race licence).  This basically means that €7 per week gives me 5 coached swim sessions, a coached track run per week, a couple of bike rides per week between April and September, plus all the other social and support benefits of being in a club.

There’s another bike and tri group called Cylodam – which is maybe a bit less formal but bit more social – and their fees are just €25 per year, so I’m joining both; I love the social element of training and triathlon, while also needing as much variety as possible in my training, so the more options for rides or runs I have the better, is how I see it.  

So, basically, I’m back in training now. Not tri training per se (or at least, not in the way I've done it in Dubai), but training to maximise the potential for 2013 being my best season yet. What does that mean exactly? Well, I’ll get into that next time.

What’s in a name?

My blogging has been pretty woeful of late, but I think I have good reason for that. Y’see, this is predominantly a triathlon blog, documenting the high and lows of my racing and training, with occasional sideways glances at the sport and meandering journeys into the world of tri-surrealism.

And, of late, triathlon hasn’t really been on my mind. I’ve done a few rides and sessions here and there but consistency has been non-existent and I’ve also taken quite a few chunks of time off. Training hard has been replaced by working way too hard, then 10 days of eating and drinking way too much, while life has generally got in the way.

And then there’s the big news. As of the beginning of November, this blog, Desert Tri Tales, will be seeing something of a reboot, a rebranding, a rebirth if you will…  as it transforms into Triathlon and Tulips, or Remrandtriathlon, or Swim, Bike/Boat, Run or…well, I’ve not decided yet, but you get the point. This isn’t due to a newfound love of floristry, 17^th Century art or cruising, but, at the end of October, I’ll be swapping sand dunes and skyscrapers for canals and clogs as I move to the Netherlands.

If I’m being honest, I’ve been hankering after a move back to Europe for a while and the time was starting to feel right. Europe rather than the UK was always my preference – for whatever reason, lifestyle I guess, mainland Europe has always felt like a better long-term fit for me and I’d quietly decided to make a move back by the end of this year anyway. When a pretty young Dutch lass that I’ve been into for a decade or so suggested Amsterdam as a suitable destination, it seemed like the perfect fit.

Swapping THIS...

...for THIS.

So, there we have it folks. The times they are a-changing.

However, I do have five weeks left in Dubai and, although I’m not going to be around for any racing (and will then be moving to Amsterdam at the beginning of winter, so no more triathlon racing for a good six months or so...), I’m enjoying putting a nice big final consistent block of training in before I go. Sure, it’s not for a race or anything, but I’m just enjoying finding a bit of form, spending time swim/bike/running with friends and team mates, and getting to train outside while I still have the chance. And the Dubai weather seems to be obliging too, as summer is finally coming to a close it seems.

Swapping THESE LOCALS...

...for THESE LOCALS.

At the moment, it’s all giddy excitement about the move. But I’m sure there’s loads that I’m going to miss about Dubai too. But that’s a subject for another blog, I guess.