A young man, carrying a very large box up the driveway of my house, screams, “this is too heavy. I can’t carry it any further.”

An older man is supervising the lift. He shouts back, “stop your whining!”

The young lad retorts, “its too heavy! My fingers hurt!”

I do not think he is suited to life as a delivery driver.

He is carrying a rowing machine. I ordered one a long time ago but due to a rowing machine shortage and delays caused by Brexit it had taken 6 months to arrive. Which means its unlikely I will now be able to qualify for this years UK Olympic rowing team. That’s definitely the reason that has stopped my selection….

I decided I needed a goal for my rowing so I tried to find out what is a good time and distance for a row. I came across the answer from an unlikely source, Australia’s favorite singing mutant – Wolverine or as as he prefers to be known Shug Jackman.

Shug is what people in Scotland call people called Hugh. I have no idea why.

So there’s my goal. I decided to try to get good enough to do 2000m in seven minutes. If so, i’ll be as good as Shug.

I decided to do a test row of 2000m so I’d have a benchmark time to improve on. I didn’t row too hard but I kept a good pace. I did 2000m in 6 min 45s.

Bugger! It turns out my target time was set by a man who is not very good at rowing.

Oh well – I’m now off to check if any of the other X-Men have set a better time that I can aim for.

I wrote the following entry a year ago and then decided not to publish it given the uncertainty over how COVID would affect everyone. It seems okay to publish it now as a way to look back at this time last year.

I thought I had trouble breathing last night. Every so often I’d need to take a deep breath while I could feel a heaviness over the top of my chest. It didn’t help that I was also coughing… and had turned green and smelt faintly of decay.

Those last two symptoms might be hyperbole.

Did I have the Coronavirus? Or, after 130 minutes on the indoor bike cycling through Zwift, was I just tired?

We seem to be gripped by a fear that everyone is about to die. Even though the statistics show that we’re not. That most people will pick up the virus and then recover a few days later, we’re treating it like the end of the world, which is depressing. I thought the world would end in fire and brimstone, not with a mountain of bogroll and tinned tomatoes.

Maybe we’ve been spoiled by films and television. We see the endtimes in terms of the spectacular when, in fact, for everyone but the heroes battling to save the planet, it ends with a full fridge and a clean bum.

I worry about catching it. I’m being irrational but still I scour websites for “What are the symptons?”, “What does it feel like to have the virus?” and “how many 42 year olds have died from the Coronavirus?”.

It’s pointless. I’m looking for answers to confirm a fear. I should be looking for “How many people have recovered from the Coronavirus?” and “How many 42 years olds have won the lottery?” because the numbers are much more comforting. 

At work today we had a call to plan how we’ll deal with the virus. Travel stopped between offices. Cancelling meetings. Limiting use of the kitchen. Asking people to let us know if they think they are ‘vulnerable’ and what to do with someone who decides to self isolate for two weeks then comes back only to self-isolate again and again until it starts to snow in December and they can take the Christmas break.

We have an action plan but it’s already out of date. We issued it 5pm. By 5:05, Boris Johnson was recommending everyone worked from home and that whole households should isolate for 14 days if one member showed symptoms. Maybe the extra toilet roll has started to make sense?

I wrote the following entry a year ago and then decided not to publish it given the uncertainty over how COVID would affect everyone. I didn’t want to publish an entry talking about going to the swimming pool when it might have been safer to stay at home. It seems okay to publish it now as a way to look back at this time last year.

We’ve been at home all week. On Monday, Boris Johnson announced a nationwide lockdown, which we’d missed as we were walking the dog and, with the announcement trailed in advance as a ‘big statement’ we pretty much expected to find that we’d been incarcerated on our return. Not that it made much difference to us. Mrs TwinbikeRun has been home for six days and I’d been home for four. We weren’t going back to work or out and about now. 

At home we’ve divided the house in two with each of us at opposite ends of the top floor. We share a speaker and she gets to choose the playlists as I don’t need to listen to music while working and can easily tune it out if I need to. However, after one day we need to establish some Spotify ground rules when choosing tracks. And, according to Mrs E, rule number one is that it’s entirely reasonable to listen to One Direction’s album ‘Made In The AM’ five times in a row.

At work, on Monday lunchtime the Scottish government announced that we must close down all work for the foreseeable. On Monday night the UK government announced we could stay open. We listened to Nicola Sturgeon and not Boris and closed down on Tuesday. Others didn’t which led to one newspaper report of angry staff recording conversation with their boss to ask him “Who was more important, the chief exec who ordered them to work, or Nicola Sturgeon?”. The answer: “Well, Nicola doesn’t pay your wages does she?”.

A day later everyone was shut. Everyone was on “furlough” and we just had a skeleton crew. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate name!” I said and the next day we were the “core team”. 

Today, is the weekend and I can tell because my laptop is closed.

Other than that I’ve tried to clean my bikes, get them ready for summer and generally potter around the garden. I don’t potter round gardens. I pay people to do the gardening. I hate gardening. Instead, I realised something bad about me today: it takes around 500 people to die before I will willingly take out a lawnmower and cut the grass. 

Lucy Charles-Barclay and Reece Barclay are both professional triathletes and husband and wife. Both were swimmers before converting to triathlon in 2014 having no background in running or cycling. They are now both successful professionals and Lucy has become one of the best triathletes in the world.

Their YouTube channel is worth a follow and this video in particular is worth a watch to see what a typical day of training if like for them as they get close to a race. I say “typical” but as the video was shot in lockdown it also shows how they are training and having to comply with COVID regulations.