Well, that didn’t turn out as planned…

Normally I’d post a snapshot of my monthly training but that would be pointless this month as I did almost no training at all. At first, it was for a very good reason. My daughter, Rebecca, was born on Wednesday 6th January. All very exciting and, because I knew it was coming – the whole nine months pregnancy does give you a few warning signs that an infant is on the way! – I knew I would need to adapt to training around her this month.

Not that training was the only thing to change. After a week at home Mrs TwinBikeRun turned to our daughter and said: “Rebecca, is Daddy’s beard scratchy?”

I’d not shaved in over a week. It was still too soon to call my middle age bumfluff a beard but it had ambitions.

“Are you telling me to shave it?” I asked her.

“I’m not saying anything,”she said “but Rebecca would prefer it.”

Damn. It was only a week and Mrs TwinBikeRun had tried to ‘turn the wean against us’!

So, in that first week I didn’t do any training, or shaving, and just tried to help out with getting Baby TwinBikeRun into a routine. Once we knew the times she was likely to sleep through the day in the second week I started to either go for a run or jump on the bike for 90 minutes.

This is easy, I thought. We can feed her, change her, play with her and then have some time for Celtman.

And then we all got COVID.

Not that we knew we had COVID. My wife felt tired one day, I had a sniffle another day and then my daughter got tested as part of a routine check and she tested positive, which meant that we’d all had it because she hadn’t met anyone else.

While we’ve been lucky compared to others who have had it, it has meant that we had to self-isolate for 10 days from the point the last one of us had symptoms.

Which meant for most of the month I wasn’t able to do anything because, if I was self-isolating, then I wasn’t doing any exercise in order to get healthy after having COVID, even though I didn’t know I’d had it until after I’d had it.

However, everyone is well and beyond the boredom and frustration that comes from staying in one place, I can’t complain about not starting Celtman training this month, not compared to the alternatives. Instead, I look forward to starting in February.

Update from Celtman

With the uncertainty caused by COVID as to whether Celtman will be possible in June it was good to get the following update this week. It’s good to see that a decision as to whether it may go ahead will be made in March so that everyone can prepare. I suspect we’ll see a race in June but it will only be open to UK based entrants.