Andrew

Walking into it (Andrew)

[Sitting in the pub with folk from work, including boss]

Me: You know what’s brilliant? Last month I added some Smart Lightbulbs to the house.

Boss: What’s a smart lightbulb?

Me: It one I can control from my phone and switch the lights on and off when I’m not in!

Boss: What’s the point of that? If you’re not in you don’t need lights.

Me: Never mind that! It’s the future! Next I can switch the heating on and off.

Boss: When you’re not in.

Me: Yes!

Boss: Right…

Me: But even better…

Boss: Better than being able to heat and light an empty house?

Me: Yes! I also connected the lightbulbs to that Amazon Echo and I can control them with my voice.

Boss: So, you can now tell your empty house to switch on the bulbs and heating you don’t need?

Me: Even better – when I’m sitting on the couch and I want to watch a film in the dark I don’t need to get up. I just tell the light to switch itself off.

Boss looks unimpressed. Colleagues look unimpressed.

Me: It’s brilliant!

Boss: By the way, what was that event you did in the summer? Norway man?

Me: Norseman.

Boss: And what did that involve again?

Me: Well, that would be a three mile swim through freezing water, 112 mile cycle and a marathon up a mountain taller than Ben Nevis!

Boss: Very impressive.

Me: Thank you.

Boss: But one thing bothers me.

Me: What’s that?

Boss: You say you swam three miles through freezing water.

Me: Yes!

Boss: You rode 112 miles.

Me: And got hypothermia.

Boss: Yet… YOU CAN’T GET OFF YOUR ARSE AND SWITCH OFF A LIGHT!

Everyone laughs.

Me (thinking): I walked into that one…

 

Iain, Race Report

Feb 12th – Kirkintilloch 12.5K (Iain)

map

The Kirkintilloch 12.5k is an “undulating” course – 12 hills in 12 KM. I prefer to call it a course with 12 downhills in 12 KM’s. That sounds less fearsome. Similarly, Mount Everest sounds better when described as a long walk down.

This should have been the first race of the year against Andrew.The winner of the event receives one point in the Todd Championship (TC)- the annual competition to find who’s the best Todd. I’ve won the last two editions. If you win the World Cup three times you get to keep it. If I beat Andrew three times do I get to keep him?

I’m not sure where I’d put him. He’s a bit too big to fit in a trophy cabinet. I’d have to stuff him and use him as a coat rack.

Unfortunately, the showdown was a non-event. Andrew pulled out due to a “life threatening” case of the tickle-y cough. A terrible disease that only Andrew gets, strangely its always at its tickliest on a race day….

Due to his forfeit I now have a 1-0 lead in this year’s TC. He asked for a medical exemption but that’s what a loser would ask for. The rules of the competition quite clearly state “If both name’s are on the starting list then its a TC event. Even if one Todd fails to start!”

The rules also say “Stop your excuses Andrew! Man up!”

I might have made up the last rule.

Last year I did the race in  1 hr 3 minutes. This year my aim was to finish in under an hour. I finished in 59:55. Job done…just!

Andrew

Been there, (haven’t) done that (Andrew)

I should’ve been racing.

Today was the Kirkintilloch 12k – a race which, like many who visit Kirkintilloch, starts in Kirkintilloch and then gets out of there as quickly as possible.

It’s a nice challenging race. Hilly, run along farm roads, and it should’ve been my third race of the year after two 10k’s in January. However, having only just recovered from the terminal man-flu (it hasn’t got me yet, but it’ll definitely get me some day!) I haven’t been running since early January and I’ve not exercised outside in four weeks. It was too soon to race. Instead, I went for a run round Cathcart and Queens Park to ease myself back into running after a week of cycling on the turbo and swimming indoors showed that I was ready to start training again.

So, while I should’ve been racing today, I’m okay with not racing as I know that ‘should’ve been’ is better than ‘could’ve been’ as ‘should’ve been’ and ‘could’ve been’ are entirely different excuses.

‘Should’ve been’ covers everything. I should’ve been racing says I should have been at the race but I was ill, I was mugged, I was saving the world from an attack by Godzilla. It’s a universal get out.

‘Could’ve been’ suggest you could have been there if you’d really, really tried. I could’ve been racing but I was in my bed. I could’ve been racing but I was too lazy. I could’ve been racing but I was hoping someone else would save the world from Godzilla while I was too lazy and not out of bed yet.

‘Could’ve been’ is the enemy of training. ‘Should’ve been’ is  unavoidable – and, knowing that, I try not to beat myself up too much about them because there’s nothing I could have done differently over the last few weeks.

So, instead, I concentrated on the third type of ‘been’ – and that’s the ‘full o’beans’!

After a ‘should’ve been’ break in training or racing, you should be ‘full o’beans’ to get going again. There’s nothing to stop you, the illness is cured (except for man-flu), the muggers are caught and Godzilla retires to the ocean to plot his revenge. And, as I return to training this week, I’m looking forward to getting back on the bike (literally and metaphorically), dipping my toes in the water (literally and metaphorically) and running round like a madman (metaphorically and definitely not literally as that would involve a hatchett). I’m ready to go. Week 1. (Again). And a fresh start at training for Celtman and Escape From Alcatraz.

No more ‘should’ve been’ just full o’beans!

Iain

YOU! ARE! A! WINNER! (Iain)

A couple of years ago I was running a race. During the last 1k of the run, I had a man running alongside me.

He looked at me. I looked at him. He then shouted “YES! YOU CAN BEAST IT! LETS DO THIS!”

Was this aimed at me? There was no one else there. It must have been me – but I decided not to “beast it”. He didn’t run any faster either.

He looked at me…again. I looked at him…again. He then shouted  “YOU’RE FLYING NOW! LETS FINISH THIS OFF!”

Seriously! Was he aiming this at me? But I choice not to “finish this off” and neither did he.

We could now see the finish line. He looked at me. I looked at him. He then shouted “ARGGHHHHH!” and changed his running style to the most over the top show-y off-y style I’ve eve seen. Arms and legs flailing everywhere. He was either running or having an epileptic fit.

As he crossed the finish line he shouted “YOU! ARE! A! WINNER!”

I crossed the finish line and though to myself “YOU! ARE! A! WANKER!”

This weekend I’m running my first race of the year. I’ll do it quietly and without fuss. I may quietly mutter to myself well done if I do it in less than an hour 🙂

Iain

Is that a wart on your foot or do you have six toes? (Iain)

My school had three rules for swimming:

  1. No dive bombing!
  2. No kit, no swim!
  3. No verrucas!

If you don’t know what a verruca is, then it’s a wart on your foot. It’s commonly caught off someone else who has one.

To prevent the spread of verrucas swimming pools had a small hole in the ground at the changing room exit. The hole would commonly be filed with a red chlorine like liquid.

On exiting I had to put both feet into the wee pool of red (normally freezing cold) liquid. The liquid supposedly contained disinfectant that protects feet from catching a verruca.

I got a verruca. Andrew got a verruca. In fact most of my school got a verruca.

It put me off going swimming. I didn’t like the wart! I didn’t like wee red pool of disease! I didn’t like the heavy smell of chlorine in the air! I didn’t like all the people in the pool swimming past or across me! I hated everything about swimming!

It put me off going to public pools. I didn’t swim for 15 years.

I didn’t discover a love of swimming until I joined the Arlington bath club. – the oldest surviving Victorian bathing complex in the world. It doesn’t have a small verruca puddle, it doesn’t stink of chlorine and most importantly it has lane etiquette.

Lane etiquette means once I start swimming in a lane its mine until I’m finished. No-one will jump in to the lane with me. No-one will swim across me and no-one will have a verruca…I hope!

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Andrew

Freestyling (Andrew)

People say that golf’s a “good walk spoiled” but, as I like golf, I prefer to say that swimming’s a “good drowning spoiled”.

Swimming is a silly sport.

Think about it. You don’t have running events where we move our legs in different ways. We don’t have the 100m normal run, the 100m bandy leg run – nor do we run 100m backwards. Yet, swimming thinks it’s perfectly okay to have umpteen different ways of thrashing your arms to make you go forward – or backwards.

Shouldn’t the person who swims 100 meters fastest be the person who… you know… swims 100 meters the fastest? Stop giving gold medals to people who are clearly not fast enough to swim fast enough.

And swimmers know they shouldn’t reward second place. There’s a hierarchy in swimming. At the top they have ‘free style’ and at the bottom they have ‘doggy paddle’ a stroke so poor they don’t even call it a stroke, they call it a paddle, a name which comes from having to use a boat because you can’t swim. And this hierarchy is clear because although swimmers have free style events where swimmers can swim any of the four main stokes – freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly – they all swim freestyle because it’s the fastest.

You wouldn’t race Uisean Bolt by jogging not sprinting, so you don’t race free style by using any stroke other than the fastest.

Yet, still we celebrate Michael Phelps even though he’s not actually got as many gold medals as you think because many of those medals are for events where, even though he came first, he was still not the fastest man to swim from one side of a pool to another.

Perhaps my views on swimming are based on the fact that I’m just jealous. Swimming is hard. I enjoy it, but it’s hard.

For years I could only swim breaststroke. But, when I entered my first triathlon, I knew I would have to learn to swim free style – and I struggled.

The first lap would be okay, the second not bad, the third was when my lungs gave out, the water leaked into my goggles and into my eyes and, by the time I’d reached the fourth lap I was knackered.

It took a few months to become even vaguely confident about swimming and, even now, a few years later, while I’ve grown to like swimming, I don’t love it the same way I love running and cycling.

Swimming is a silly sport.

But it’s part of triathlon and a major part of Celtman so, to help with getting ready for this year’s race, I’ve changed gym (more on that next time) and joined one that’s easier to get to first thing in the morning. And while I’ve been unable to train the last few weeks I have made one major change to help when I start again. I’m now getting up at 6:15 rather than 7:00 so that I can train in the morning before going to work. And, a major part of that change will be to go to the pool at 7am.

No wonder I hate swimming. It’s made me get up early in the morning.

Damn you swimming!

However my new gym has one advantage over all the other gyms in Glasgow (no, it’s not that the pool is only 21m long so it makes you think you swim a lap faster than anywhere else) , it’s the fact that it has a policy of only allowing one swimmer a lane.

The bottom of the pool has lanes marked on it and, once you’ve picked one, no one else can use it until you’re finished. No more sharing a land with someone really, really slow. (Or Iain, as I call him). No more sharing a lane with someone who wears indecent running shorts instead of swimming trunks. (Or, again, Iain, as I call him). Instead, you can swim back and forth free and uninterrupted swimming any stoke you like – even if you know there only one stroke that really counts.

Andrew

End of month report – January (Andrew)

Training begins… again!

My cough/cold/ebola/brain tumour/man flu has started to fade and it’s time to start training again. After a successful thee (yes, three!) whole days of training two weeks ago it’s probably wise  to avoid jumping back in at the same level. Instead, to make sure that I’m not going to start coughing all over again, I’m going to start with the three T’s: turbo, treadmill and t’swimming (which is what someone form Yorkshire would call it).

Once I’ve got a few days without a reaction I’ll start my training program again from where I stopped. Fingers crossed this should ease my back in and see me right for the rest of the month.

January report:

[cough] [cough] best glossed over [cough] [cough]

February goals:

Onwards and upwards!

Iain

End of Month Report: January (Iain)

My plan for January was:

  • Bike (on average) 75 miles a week.
  • Run (on average) 13 miles a week running including at least one 10k.
  • Do yoga at least once a week

It looks like I’ll finish the month:

  • Bike (on average) 100 miles a week.
  • Run (on average) 16 miles a week including four 10k+ runs.
  •  Most weeks I’ve managed two yoga sessions

Overall, I’m pleased with the start to the year. The weather has been unusually good which is reflected in my better than average performance. There hasn’t been a day when it’s not been possible to commute to work by bike. In previous years I’ve lost at least a week in January due to snow and ice.

My plan for February is:

  • Bike (on average) 100 miles a week.
  • Run (on average) 16 miles a week including a 10k+ run once a week.
  • Do yoga at least once a week
  • Swim twice a week.

My plan is to slowly increase bike mileage every month. I might not be so lucky with the weather in February so I’ll make the goal the same as what I achieved this month.

I’ve joined a swimming pool so I should be able to swim twice a week as its on my way to and from work. I won’t put any distance down for it as I just want to enjoy the first few weeks back.

This month training was also good for photos. Here’s a selection from my training. If you want to see more then follow me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/imacivertodd/ 

Andrew is not on Instagram. I think he’s worried about how many likes I get in comparison to him 😉

 

 

Andrew, Uncategorized

T2 Trainingspotting (Andrew)

There’s a scene in the original Trainspotting where Ewan McGregor’s character, Renton, goes through cold turkey to quit heroin.

He locks himself in his bedroom, boards up the door and vomits, shakes and hallucinates a … well… there’s a reason the film was rated an 18.

And I have to say, after a week of drinking, slurping, sucking and sniffing every drug known to man – and I’m talking the real hard stuff: Lemsip, Sinex, Strepsils, cough mixture (chest and throat) and the class A narcotic known as Night Nurse – I think I’m going to have to follow Renton and lock myself away too if I’m going to quit my new vices.

But the problem is that I don’t want to quit. The drugs are just too good!

It started simply. I just want to get better to start training for Celtman. At first I sucked a Strepsil to help my throat, then I moved onto cough mixture before, just minutes later I was downing a bottle of Night Nurse and desperately searching the kitchen cupboard for the vitamin C tablets I knew were in there but hadn’t seen since the day I bought them.

I was a junkie – and it was all triathlon’s fault.

Now I know how Lance Armstrong started.

First, it was the aspirin. Then it was a flu shot. Next thing you know you’re strapped to a blood bag in the back of a bus parked on the side of hill in France and you really wanted to do was to get back on your bike and train!

It’s a slippery slope!

And the worst thing about it is that drugs are better than actual drugs: I can’t imagine cocaine is half as thrilling as getting a double blast of Sinex up each nostril. How could it be? Does it have that nostril punch of liquid snow and summer mint? Does it have that addictive rush of brain freeze and back of the mouth bitterness?

And as for Night Nurse – how can heroin compare with that moresih mix of what looks like radioactive snot? If you want knocked out, then knock back a cup of Night Nurse before bed. It’s a coma in a bottle.

The Verve sang that ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ but if they’d ever tried Night Nurse then they wouldn’t have sung anything at all because they’d have been up all night* having some of that ol’ Night Nurse!

(*well, 20 minutes, that Night Nurse is potent stuff for knocking you out).

So, as my cough  has changed from a chest cough to a throat cough to a phlegmy cough and back to a chest cough I have changed from the clean cut Andrew Todd of just a week and half ago into a full blown junkie.

And I’ve still not got rid of my cough.

So, until I do, I keep telling myself I can quit anytime. I can stop any day.

But not today.

(Or tomorrow)

Andrew

[Cough] [Splutter] [Cough] (Andrew)

Day one.

Perfect. One hour on the bike on a FTP test for Trainerroad. If you don’t know what FTP stands for then I think stands for “Faster Than you normally Pedal*” because, as the name says, it makes you go faster than you normally pedal.

(It also stands for something else entirely in Glasgow!)

The test consists of a warm up, a cool down and 20 minutes of cycling as fast as you can. In my case it kept telling me to cycle at a cadence of 150, which is fast, real fast. Just imagine a kid with a sparkler making circles in the air. Now, imagine that kid hopped up on Sunny Delight. That’s how fast it was telling me to go. Sunny D fast.

I struggled to keep my legs spinning that fast. I went as fast as I could go but I never hit 150.

Or 140.

Or 130.

But I tried.

That’s the main thing (I keep telling myself).

From that Trainerroad was able to adjust all it’s other setting so that…

Jumping Ahead to Day Three

I’d have one hour 15 minutes on the bike at a rate which was just right…

…if I could only pedal faster.

Blimey, charley, luv a duck. Even after the test it was still telling me to pedal at 130 – 140 pedal strokes a minute and I must admit I struggled. I tried to go faster but, by an hour, I was struggling to keep up and slowed down.

I finished it though and, because the programme required a run immediately afterwards, I even went out and ran round the block dodging unwanted Christmas trees on the pavements (today was bin day for collecting trees).

I was tired, lethargic, and I thought it was partly a response to my third day of getting up at 6:15 to fit in training before work and an early start which meant…

Jumping Back To Day Two

I was swimming at 7am and joining the small number of people waiting for the pool to open. I swam 2 km. I’ve not done that since September last year. And I was really happy to see I still could which makes…

[Cough]

Day four 

[Cooooouuuuugghhhhh!] [Throaty rasp!]

Such a disappointment.

My cold from last week, which earlier in the week was the occasional cough is now a full on [cough] can’t talk without [cough] interuptions and [cough] can’t walk [cough] without coughing [cough].

A throat infection or chest infection. A tickly cough just at the base of the neck which makes it impossible to tell if it’s an ‘above the neck okay to train’ type cough or a ‘below the neck not okay to train’ type cough.

It’s now day six. I’m still coughing so, until it goes away, I’ll add two new stats for this week one of training.

Andrew: 0

Cough: 1.

*It actually stands for Functional Threshold Power which is just a fancy way of saying Faster Than you normally Pedal.