It is not a secret that after thirty years competing in triathlon over all distances and having represented our country on the GBR Age Group Triathlon Team on mat occasions that these days we may do our training in a slightly different way. For many years we either rode out on a hundred-mile bike ride winter and summer as our Sunday training or we got together with a group of friends and enjoyed a range of video bike workout sessions our favourites among those were the Sufferfest sets. We have always found that it is better to train in a group to do head banger sets like those just to keep your motivation levels high in fact for a good number of years we started the year with a six- hour turbo session that I doubt very much that we would have got through to the end without some of our Tri friends pouring sweat in equal amounts.
This last year, we have all had to make changes and Stephen and I have spent our Sunday mornings training session watching either a big sporting event recorded from TV or catch up on a movie or something. During the week we often watch a couple of episodes of The West Wing something which we have both enjoyed already once before when it was first shown in 1999.
The coming of winter brought a welcome change and for a while now we have been watching a layer cake of Bobsleigh events and Biathlon. Steve records some of the Biathlon series, and come the long Sunday work out, we watch some of the Biathlon to start off for our warm-up, before the Bobsleigh live coverage starts. We watch that Live through the computer transferred to our big-ish TV direct from the IBSF site on the internet, which is superb coverage. Having yesterday watched the two-man-bob; this morning, we were able to see the four-man-bob from Königsee in Germany. This was shown in two parts, the first run, where the slowest sliders would be eliminated and then later on this morning came the second round with the fastest twenty teams. The GB men ended up 7th and 13th (I think) which was an improvement from the last results. Onwards and upwards hopefully.
We are big winter sports fans and so this layer cake system, makes a perfect turbo session for the pair of us with our bikes set up on the trainers in front of the TV. Once we had shouted the two GB 4-man Bob teams on their first run and watched the rest of that section, we then swop over to the biathlon again and watch more of a recording from yesterday until it was time for the 4-man Bob final. Then when that ended it was back to Biathlon again. Finally, we have a nice restoring snack on Sunday, since we do not eat breakfast before training.
We have our favourite athletes in both sports and do quite a bit of shouting at the television to cheer our men and women on even though they are a little out of earshot! Obviously, we are rooting for the GB team in the Bob events mainly, but through years of watching the sport we also have other teams that we follow and hope to see do well. The National loyalty interest does not apply to Biathlon since we don’t seem to have any biathletes or interest it seems, and in fact we only have a couple of other triathlete friends who regularly watch Biathlon. I find it a wonderful sport to watch and we have been to watch live, a number of times, it gets to be very exciting and in that, it works well while we are on our turbo bikes because we find the cādance whizzes up when the race hots up and the lead changes, time and time again, because they miss a shot on one the laps. Even when one athlete looks as though they have got the race in the bag, they can still, through tension and pressure of being in the lead, it so often happens that on the last shot, they will miss and go flying back 5-10 positions. They are utterly exhausted when they reach the line, it is a killer sport. Steve and I are happy to see the best athlete win, whoever they are and whatever country they represent. If they have earned that win, they will also have won our applause and smile of satisfaction to see true sports people raise their game.
This morning it nearly killed us too, as we pedalled away for three hours that simply flew by and left us both dripping with sweat and happy to have forgotten the state of the world for just a little while.
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