The Ultimate Olympian

Cycling - Road Time Trial

2007-09-16T17:53:00.000+01:00

The victor, who foolishly finished so quickly that he was back before the pub had even opened.

It wasn't terribly in keeping with the shambolic nature of this quest thus far, but I went to bed early (and sober) last night. I wasn't worried about making it around the course today - 30 miles probably sounds like a fair distance if you don't do much cycling, but it's really not that far. This event for the real Olympians is the sprint event. The really hard road race is the other one; you're allowed to draft, your time is generally unimportant and long sections are run at a pedestrian pace. Oh yeah, and it's five times longer than today's effort.

No, I went to bed early because I fancied that with some decent weather (i.e., no wind and no rain) and a course that I'd been promised was "pretty flat" I had a good chance of going under two hours for the 50KM. I woke up refreshed and ready for anything - even more so when I looked outside and saw a clear blue sky and not a breath of wind disturbing anything.

It was all downhill from there - or perhaps in keeping with the topic in hand, I should say it was all uphill.

It wasn't ideal that I had to cycle 10KM to get to the start but at the time I tried to put a positive spin on it and treated it like a warm up, not letting myself push any high gears and just coasting along. I quite enjoyed that bit.

At the start of the race (which was a race for no one but me - for everyone else, it was a leisurely sponsored cycle through the Oxfordshire countryside on a Sunday morning) I set off with intent and (even better) with Gareth (above). I had been slightly worried that this might turn into another 50KM walk scenario where I set off in front and no one came with me, but half a mile in, I realised Gareth was on my back wheel and invited him past so that I could sit on his for a while and conserve some energy.

Or, as it turned out, so that I could fail to find a matching gear and instead watch him disappear into the distance. He very kindly looked back a few times and eased up, waiting for me to join him, but the first hill did for me and he was gone.

The opening was tough, with hill after relentless hill presenting itself. I was vaguely familiar with this bit of the course though and knew I just had to hang in there for a little while and I'd hit a big descent, at the bottom of which was a mile and a half that was relatively flat, or at worst only a little uphill. If I toughed it out, I thought, I might even be able to catch up with, or at least catch sight of, Gareth at the bottom of the drop.

And I did... sort of. I caught a fleeting glimpse of his arse disappearing around a corner about a mile and a half away. I pounded on anyway. Beyond that corner I had no idea what lay ahead, but I dared to hope that the worst of the climbing was over. Hope is a foolish thing and should never be entertained while sport is in progress by anyone other than fans and commentators.

Around that corner lay a quaint little church, followed by one of those tree-lined hills that is so steep you can't see the top of it. All you see in front of you is road, like a mocking grey wall. An entirely involuntary cry of "Bastard!" escaped my lips, rather loudly, and much to the tutting disapproval of a late-comer to the church service.

I soldiered on, but quickly had to drop a gear, and then another, and then another, and then there weren't any more gears left to drop, so I had to stand up out of the saddle, and then I stopped being able to make it go forward at all, so I had to get off and push. All I could think, the whole way to the top (which thankfully wasn't all that far), was that I was glad I was far enough ahead of the rest that they couldn't see me and far enough behind Gareth that he couldn't either. I felt much better about it all later when I found out that he had made it to the top without getting off his bike, but once there had had to stop for a quick tactical puke.

I knew that was going to be my lowest moment. I had seen it on the elevation chart of the course - it's the line that goes virtually vertical at the end of the seventh mile in the picture in the preview - so I knew there was nothing worse to come. What also encouraged me was something I'd overheard at the start.

There was a "Road Closed" coming up sometime soon, but we were to ignore it because we would be turning off before the closure onto something I'd heard described as "a really beautiful piece of road."

And it was - about two and a half miles of newly surfaced black licorice that was all descent. At one point, I was doing close to 40 miles an hour, the climbs forgotten, the wind howling in my ears, and my tyres almost noiseless. By the end of it, I'd nearly reached the halfway mark. I checked my time (as I had been doing every five kilometres) and discovered that the long drop had brought me back bang on two hour pace for 50KM. The course was a little shorter than that. Hope appeared again, and almost as soon as it did, so did another climb.

So it went for the rest of the ride. I would climb, swearing my way to the top of the rises through the freshening wind (which was maybe more demoralising than the gradient) and in doing so would lose all hope of making it home in under two hours. Then I would descend, smiling and (once) even yelping with childlike delight at the speed of it all, and in doing so would build hope again.

Each repetition of this cycle however saw me climbing more slowly, taking longer at the top to catch my breath, and less in control on the way down as my whole body - legs first - turned progressively to jelly. I began to accept that I wasn't going to make it.

In the end, I appeared back on a familiar road much closer to the end than I had anticipated and suddenly thought I might still have a chance to beat my target. I hammered at the pedals rather pathetically, but it was all in vain. As I arrived at the finish, my onboard clock clicked over to 12:07. It had taken me two hours and two minutes.

It was amazing how soon after getting off my bike I felt much better.

Gareth had finished in about one hour and fifty-six minutes - a fine effort for which I rewarded him with complex carbohydrate energy drink (you probably know it as Carlsberg).

In 1920, the result was decided late when it turned out that one of the competitors had been held up for four minutes at a level crossing. There were three of them on our course, and I approached each one praying for a four minute breather, but all to no avail.

I also thought at one point that I might have to take a diversion when I saw a sign that said no vehicles weighing in excess of 7.5 tonnes were permitted to pass. My legs felt at least twice as heavy as that by then.

I also got attacked by a dragonfly, which spent what I'm sure was a very unpleasant half a mile trying to get out from between my shirt and my jacket. It could have been worse. Marie got stung by a wasp that tried to annex her shoe.

All in all, I feel like I achieved something this morning - or at least more than I usually do on a Sunday morning - and on top of that, I now have less than a hundred events left to do. At my current rate of event completion, I should finish in time for the games in 2020. Unless I get injured.

The average speed of the winner of the time trial in Sydney in 2000 was 48.75KM per hour. My average speed was 23.6KM per hour. I make that 48% Olympian. Not bad for a warm up. The main road race is 150 miles long - or five laps of the circuit I did this morning. I may have to build my fitness a bit more before I take that on.

Result of Cycling - Road Time Trial - 48KM in 2 hrs 2 minutes - 48% Olympian

Cycling - Road Time Trial Preview

2007-09-15T17:22:00.000+01:00

The individual road time trial is contested at the Olympics over a course that can vary in length from 45 to 55 km. Riders start at 90 second intervals and the fastest time wins. Simple really.

Tomorrow, I’ll be cycling a little over 48km to raise money for Sobell House and to tick another event off the list.

The road time trial was first staged in the Olympics of 1912 in Stockholm over a slightly longer course (196 miles, no less) around a lake. The first riders had to be set off at two o’clock in the morning in order to get everyone round the course. There was no shortage of mishap in that first race. A few hundred yards from the start line, a Swedish rider was hit by a motor-wagon. Further round the course, a Russian rider fell into a ditch and lay there unconscious until he was discovered some time later by a passing farmer.

I’ve been known to fall of my bike from time to time, but as yet not into a ditch. I’m hoping I can keep that record going tomorrow.

In 1920, in Antwerp, the course was intersected by six railway crossings. Officials were placed at each one to record any enforced delay to the riders. Initially, it appeared that the South African Henry Kaltenburn had won, but it later turned out that Harry Stenqvist from Sweden had been held up for four minutes at a level crossing and when that delay had been accounted for, he was declared the winner.

There was a 60 year hiatus during which no road time trial was staged at an Olympic games, but it was reintroduced in Atlanta in 1996, where professionals were permitted to compete in cycling events for the first time.

Having won the Tour de France 5 times in a row between 1991 and 1995, Miguel Indurain was finally dethroned in 1996 and managed to finish only 11th. Exhausted, and no doubt slightly demoralised, he seriously thought about dropping out of the Olympics (which had already started on the other side of the Atlantic). It took a personal appeal from his close friend (and president of the IOC at the time) Juan Antonio Samaranch to persuade him to compete.

In the road race, held just ten days after the end of the Tour de France, Indurain finished a disappointing 26th. Three days later, he won the time trial – an event in which he was the defending world champion at the time – by twelve seconds from his fellow Spaniard Abraham Manzano, and by half a minute from Britain’s Chris Boardman.

Also in that race – finishing sixth, nearly two and a half minutes behind Indurain – was a relatively unknown American rider who was to discover just two months later that his body was riddled with cancer.

By the time he turned up in Sydney four years later, Lance Armstrong had undergone surgery and chemotherapy, and then started winning the Tour de France - by the time of the Olympics, he had just won his second of the seven consecutive Tour de France titles he would eventually pick up. A month before the Olympics, he crashed into a car in training, breaking a vertebrae in his neck. Despite that, he still lined up as co-favourite with Jan Ullrich, but in the end finished only third behind the German and Vyacheslav Ekimov, who snuck past them both to claim gold.

Having gained a taste for medals, Ekimov claimed a silver in the event in 2004 (Armstrong by then was focusing purely on winning the Tour de France every year) behind the American Tyler Hamilton.

As the course varies in length each time, there isn’t really a world record for this event, but my target is to break two hours. I’ve been cycling to and from work most days throughout the summer, but that’s a mere 10km a day with only one tiny hill to negotiate, so I might struggle with that.

Kev assures me that tomorrow’s route is quite flat, but I note from the map above that there is more than 1000 feet of elevation to climb over the course, and as anyone who has seen that terrible Hugh Grant film knows, a thousand feet makes a mountain.

[With thanks, as ever to David Wallechinsky's superb The Complete Book of the Olympics for all the historical factoids]

Baseball (well, sort of)

2007-08-14T19:15:00.001+01:00

Baseball - In the Spirit of Barry Bonds

2007-08-08T15:32:00.000+01:00

Different photographs, same player. But he didn't take any steroids. No, sir.

When I first started this challenge (almost three years ago) I gathered up a few books to read by way of preparatory research. I would classify them roughly as “men having mid-life crises via the medium of ridiculous challenges”.

I read about Dave Gorman’s efforts to find other people called Dave Gorman, I studied Danny Wallace’s bid to have people join him (without ever telling them why), I examined in great detail Tony Hawks’ travails as he travelled around Ireland with a fridge, and I devoured Tim Moore’s account of his attempt to cycle the route of the Tour de France.

Two common themes emerged: the vital role played by alcohol in the initial conception of the challenge, and the importance of bending the rules of your challenge to accommodate the fact that it was maybe a bit too ambitious (and you were maybe a bit too drunk) when you came up with it in the first instance.

Having mirrored the first theme exactly (and continuously throughout the last three years), it’s now time to tackle the second theme and start bending the rules a little. Appropriately enough, in the week that one of US sport’s most notorious alleged cheats hit his 756th home run [YouTube] to become the new all-time home run leader, it’s with a bit of baseball cheating of my own that I’m going to begin.

As you will know if you’ve been paying attention (or as you can learn of you read the previous entry), I attended a baseball training session with the Oxford Kings several weeks ago. That night I batted, I threw the ball, I caught the ball and I generally ran around a lot chasing the ball. By the end of the session, I felt like I’d done more than enough to get a flavour of the game and to tick it from the list.

Promised an actual game that weekend however, I didn’t tick it off the list but looked forward instead to my first start in a baseball game. In the end, the game was abandoned due to lack of players.

Last night, I got roped into playing softball for the Oxford Angels. Although I’ve played before, I still don’t really know what I’m doing, but last night, I crossed some sort of understanding threshold, if not completely, then enough to realise that the game we were playing was exciting as it came down to the wire.

Despite trailing by several runs going into the bottom of the seventh (the final innings), we won. I displayed what I can only describe as incredibly uncharacteristic restraint twice in the last two innings when I got walked. I stepped up to bat and just watched ball after hittable ball float past me (and past the plate), all the while knowing that if I swung at one and got out Captain Jamie wouldn’t be very pleased.

In short, reader, I got involved in the ebb and flow of a baseball-derived game, and frankly, I’m ticking it off the list. Not only that, but I played softball too, which is on the girl’s list!

Baseball is the sort of game I think I could grow to like watching if I was exposed to it for any length of time, but I’ve always said that I didn’t think it belonged in the Olympics (and, along with softball, after Beijing, it won’t be on the programme anymore). For now though, I’m through with this leg of my challenge.

UPDATE:

I got called back for more on Thursday night. It was the last game of the season, so the other team turned up in some very innovative fancy dress.

Yes, the catcher does have a pair of wings, but her outfit was fairly tame. There was a tiger in left field.

There was an angel catching, so naturally third base was being covered by...

Satan! Biting her nails.

There's video of the aftermath of this in the next post.

Baseball Preview

2007-06-22T13:00:00.000+01:00

I might kill two birds with one stone on Sunday and get the boxing out of the way too.

Last night, I attended a practice session with the Oxford Kings baseball team. On Sunday, I will be making my debut and ticking baseball off the Olympic list.

In 2005, the IOC voted to remove baseball from the Olympic programme for the 2012 Olympics. It remains an Olympic sport though and there will be votes in future that may see it reinstated to the programme. My list was drawn up at the end of the Athens games though, so I need to have a go at it.

Baseball is a bit of an Olympic tart. She turned up to a number of Olympic parties and flirted with everyone before disappearing for years at a time without so much as a word or a phone call.

She first showed up without an invite in 1904 but somehow blagged her way into the St Louis Olympics anyway. She then staggered in again eight years later in Stockholm when an American team played Sweden (and beat them 13-3). In Berlin in 1936, two American teams played each other for no apparent reason (or medal). In Helsinki in 1952, Baseball slipped quietly in the back door dressed as a Finn as two teams from the host nation played a modified version of the sport, which they imaginatively called Finnish Baseball. There was a one game exhibition between the US and Australia in Melbourne in 1956, and the Japanese then took on the yanks in a similar fashion in Tokyo in 1964.

After twenty years away, baseball returned and made an exhibition of herself in the 1984 games when someone got around to arranging a tournament in Los Angeles (Japan beat the US in the final). In 1988, she was upgraded from an “exhibition” to a “demonstration” sport (and the US beat Japan in the final). Finally, in Barcelona in 1992, the Olympic games made an honest woman (or “official sport”) of baseball.

Since the IOC started dishing out medals, Cuba has won three gold and a silver, the US has managed one gold and one bronze, and Japan has managed one silver and two bronze. Australia and Taiwan have each won one silver, while South Korea managed a bronze in 2000.

I’m not sure where I stand on baseball as an Olympic sport. One criterion I broadly apply is that if winning the gold medal at the Olympics isn’t the pinnacle of the sport, then the sport shouldn’t be in the Olympic games. That certainly applies to baseball. You can say what you like about the misnomer, but the World Series is where it’s at if you’re into baseball. The game is played and loved in many other countries of course, but I doubt there are many top class participants in those countries who would turn down the opportunity to play Major League Baseball if it arose.

I doubt any such opportunity will be doing much arising for me. The practice session last night was fine – I can catch the ball most of the time, I can throw the ball roughly where I was meaning to throw it most of the time, and I can hit the ball with the bat now and again - but as with all new sports, it’s hard to do those simple things when you’re also trying to remember which particular simple thing you’re supposed to be doing.

I haven’t played a game of baseball before, but I’ve played a little softball since I’ve lived in Oxford. My abiding memories of doing so involve people shouting at me “Stop running!” at moments when it seemed logical to me to be running very fast indeed, people shouting at me “Hold on to the ball!” at moments when it seemed logical to me to throw the ball as hard as I could to someone standing on a base, and people shouting at me “Run! For the love of Jesus, run!” when it seemed logical to me to just stand and admire the shot I had just hit.

In short, logic (or at least what passes for logic in my brain) has very little to do with baseball. I think on Sunday I’ll just turn up and try to do exactly what I’m told. It won’t be easy, but there’s a first time for everything I suppose.

I'll be hoping for as little of this kind of outcome as possible.

Happy Birthday, Paavo

2007-06-13T16:59:00.000+01:00

Spookily enough, having mentioned him on Monday, today would have been Paavo Nurmi's 110th birthday*. It feels like an omen, dragging me towards finishing the challenge next year at the Helsinki marathon.

There is an interesting article all about Nurmi and his amazing Olympic career on the IOC website. I highly recommend it, particularly for the video footage at the end [will launch a new media player].

There is also a profile of the Flying Finn here that's worth a read. Inspiring stuff. I might go for a run tonight.

*It's a shame he died in 1973. If he were still alive, he could have looked forward next year to confusing a radio D.J. in Northern Ireland who once infamously read a request on air "This one's for Mary, a hundred and eleven years old today! Amazing! Well done, Mary." He played the song and at the end of it rather sheepishly announced "That one was for Mary who, contrary to initial reports, is actually ill and not 111. Sorry about that, folks. Sorry, Mary."

Olympics 101

2007-06-11T15:34:00.000+01:00

This challenge has its roots in being a bit rubbish. In a way, I was inspired to take it up in order to teach myself a lesson – that I’m not as good at all things sporting as I tend to think I am – but as it turns out, it has highlighted many other areas in which I am a bit rubbish.

I’m a bit rubbish at organising myself. I’m a bit rubbish at motivating myself. I’m a bit rubbish at getting on with it.

Strangely though, it’s something a bit rubbish that has inspired me to get back on this Olympic horse; compared to the new Olympic logo – sorry, brand – I feel quite professional, organised, and, let’s face it, not quite so rubbish.

New inspiration aside, I have been quite tempted for quite a while to admit defeat and just knock this all on the head.

The regular reader – or at least, the regular reader who hasn’t completely abandoned hope that I might write something new here (hi, mum) – will no doubt have worked out that my mood tends to swing more often than Tiger Woods on the practice ground. It’s a blessing and a curse. Without such mental highs, it would never have occurred to me to embark on anything quite so ambitious and foolish in the first place; without such mental lows, I would have completed many more events by now.

Today marks the beginning of the 147th week of the challenge. I have completed a mere 27 events so far, which means I am 63.5 events behind schedule and still have 101 events to complete before the next games in China. The opening ceremony in Beijing is scheduled for August 8th 2008, which is less than 60 weeks away.

I may have left myself too much to do – worse still, I might have let myself get boxed-in like some latter day Tom McKean – but all I can do is try, which, if memory serves, is all I ever set out to do in the first place.

***

There are a few events in the pipeline for the summer months already. On 15th July, I will be riding the 30km time trial with Kev on the roads in and around Oxford (if you want to join us, drop me a mail). On 11th August, Kev and I will be playing in a beach volleyball tournament in Gloucester (Kev can be my wingman anytime), and on 9th September, I will be running in the Anthony Nolan Trust Only Fools Run over the cross country course at Blenheim (instead of doing it on a horse, which, I have been reliably informed, would almost certainly result not only in my death, but quite possibly the death of the horse as well).

I’m also getting ahead of myself and trying to figure out how to finish the challenge in August of next year. The final event of the games is always the marathon, and I think it would make sense for me to do that last as well, not least because it’s the event I will need the most time to recover from. Doing a marathon in the UK in August perhaps isn’t overly wise though, so I’ve been looking at some alternative venues.

The most interesting ones so far are: Stockholm (you get to finish in the 1912 Olympic stadium), Reykjavik (should be nice and cool), Omsk (see Reykjavik), Helsinki (which also features an Olympic stadium finish) and the Isle of Man. A lot will probably depend on the timing of the events, but at the moment, I’m leaning towards Helsinki, not least because of the Paavo Nurmi connection. Any thoughts?

Athletics - 800m

2007-04-05T12:18:00.000+01:00

Seb Coe and Steve Ovett - a couple of 800m experts.

A mere six months after our first attempt at running the 800 metres (preview) turned into a very entertaining evening in the pub instead, Kev and I returned to the Iffley Road track last night to have another go at it.

This time, you’ll be delighted to learn, we managed to run the requisite two laps before retiring to the Marsh Harrier for a Guinness.

Kev is a bit of a runner. His three-marathon-challenge has turned into a four-marathon-challenge (three down, one to go), but as ever he offered to help me complete an event and came along to act as timekeeper, morale booster and opposition.

We did a couple of laps at a gentle pace by way of a warm-up and then, having pointed the video camera at the home straight and set it running, we pointed ourselves at the first bend and did likewise.

Unfortunately, video footage of two men running around a track at something less than a blistering pace – especially when you only get to see them for about a third of each lap – isn’t exactly riveting. Thanks to the Benny Hill feature on my iBook, I have managed to speed it up a little to save you the effort of watching it in real time.

At the end of the clip, Kev holds his phone to the camera. This is because he was using it to time us and not because Lord Coe had just text to say we were bobbins.

We set off together and remained so for about 200 metres, at which point Kev started drifting ahead. During our warm-up, my legs had felt full of spring and ready for action; almost as soon as we started running for real, they felt full of lead and ready for a bit of a sit-down.

We entered the home straight for the first time and Kev had already built up a reasonable lead. He was carrying his phone and using the stopwatch feature on it to time us. I guessed he was trying to drag me along at the pace I needed to be keeping in order to break the magical double-the-world-record barrier. As it turns out, he was just showing off.

He continued to show off into the second lap and I started fading fast. Halfway down the back straight, I felt something I haven’t felt since the early stages of the swim in the triathlon in 2005 – an almost overpowering urge to just stop and give up.

Proper athletes are astounding running machines with brains that focus sharply. As they come down the back straight in the final lap of the 800 metres, they are thinking about just one thing – when to kick for home – and everything else just sinks into the background.

The way I run is also astounding, but in the same way that a octopus falling out of a tree is astounding, and my brain has a tendency to wander wildly out of its lane at crucial moments. As I came down the back straight in the final lap, I was thinking about a million different things and none of them were even remotely helping me to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I came off the final bend and into the home straight to see that Kev was nearly finished. I presumed I was a long way off the target time, but suddenly, inspired presumably by the realisation that it was all nearly over, I found a burst of energy in my legs and was able to run a little harder over the final 50 metres.

I finished and Kev was all cockney grinning as he imparted the news that I’d smashed the target time and run a mighty 03:02.01.

I quit smoking at New Year. Three months on and I’m feeling very good about that, and feeling very healthy because of it. For an hour after the race last night I coughed and spluttered and felt generally tight in my chest as though I had started again. It’s good to tick another event off (a mere 101 remain), and always nice to beat the target time, but the biggest lesson from last night is that I’m pretty hopelessly unfit again (if I was ever anything else).

Result of Athletics – 800 metres:
1st Kevin Game (GBR) 02:46.00 61% Olympian
2nd John McClure (GBR) 03:02.01 56% Olympian

The Oxford Bogtrotters

2007-04-05T10:36:00.000+01:00

Including special music, especially for Jamie.

Baskets and Volleys

2007-04-02T14:15:00.000+01:00

Basketball was invented in 1891 when Doctor James Naismith - a Canadian PE teacher at a school in Springfield, Massachusetts – famously nailed a peach basket ten feet up a wall and told his students to have a go at lobbing a football into it. In a moment of inspiration, he called the game Basket Ball. His new game was initially popularised and developed across the USA and Canada by the YMCA.

A little more than three years later, William G. Morgan - the PE director in a YMCA just ten miles down the road in Holyoke, Massachusetts - decided to invent an indoor sport for the older members that was less rough than basketball but that still required a bit of effort. Less prosaic in his naming technique than Naismith had been, Morgan originally referred to his new game as Mintonette, but the American public at large couldn’t cope with his fancy French-sounding name and quickly took to calling it what it looked like: volleyball.

Basketball was an Olympic demonstration sport as early as 1904, but was only fully adopted in 1936. Since then, the USA has won all but three of the Olympic titles; the first time they lost a match was to the USSR in the controversial final of 1972. In Athens in 2004, despite fielding a team with combined earnings that could have funded a reasonably ambitious space programme, the USA had to settle for the bronze medal behind Argentina and Italy.

Volleyball was a demonstration sport in Paris in 1924, but had to wait even longer than basketball before it made it into the full programme, which it finally did in 1964. Despite being invented in the USA, the Olympic competition has been dominated by the European (particularly Eastern European) teams. It’s a serious business in Europe it would seem; in Greece last week, the crowd got so excited at a volleyball game that a riot kicked off resulting in the death of one man and the suspension of all team sports in Greece for two weeks.

Thankfully, nothing so dramatic happened on Friday night. Once again, an Oxford University sports club came up trumps and the volleyball club sent along half a dozen top class players who were willing to give up their Friday night to show a bunch of complete novices how to play their sport. They did so with patience, understanding and kindness. Perhaps as a result – or perhaps because it’s just a damn fine game – everyone seemed to really enjoy the first event of the evening.

After Brian and Ludo took the lead in showing us some basic technique and outlined the rules, we split into two teams of mixed gender, race, height and ability to have a match. Ludo started trying to formulate some sort of game plan for our team, but in the end resorted to my favourite sporting technique – “Never mind… we’ll improvise” – and we were under way.

We fought three close sets, each of which was littered with entertaining and impressive play, but in the end my team finished a tantalising second. I got the distinct sense that the top guys weren’t giving us the heat, but I also got the sense that it was probably just as well.

A couple of the guys were genuinely enormous individuals. On the odd occasion when they did find themselves opposite each other at the net, it was like watching gazelles robbing a pogo stick factory. It wasn’t so much the height they achieved – impressive as that was – as the length of time they seemed to be able to stay airborne; a talent some of them hung around to transfer to the basketball court later on.

Kev (right) would be the first to admit that he's not the tallest, but Tim (left) is 6'5". I dread to think what that makes Anders (centre).

Having played basketball, I could see why William G. Morgan felt the need to invent volleyball as an alternative for the “older members”. Having only a handful of people who really knew what they were doing perhaps hindered us, but it seems a game in which a lot of frenetic action leads to very little.

I have watched some basketball on TV and thought at the time that it looked a bit dull - they all just run to one end and score, then all run to the other end and score. Our game was exhausting, but it wasn’t dull, even if by and large all we did was just run to one end and not score and then run to the other end and not score. The only dull bits from my point of view were the bits when I stood around the centre circle trying not to wheeze too much.

There wasn’t much ebb and flow to our score line – perhaps the teams turned out to be a little lopsided – but my team, hindered by my lack of pace, fitness and talent, quickly found itself adrift and ended up losing by a margin that was in the end virtually forgotten. All I can really remember is that we were 42-28 behind going into the final quarter, and it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t much need to keep track of the score anymore - there was only one team going to win and we weren’t it.

Ben, the guy behind me, spent the hour that followed this warm up showing me that height in basketball isn't all it's cracked up to be. Without him on our team, we would have lost by a lot more than we eventually did.

The disparity in the scores did allow for some top class showboating. The prize for comedy moment of the game has to go to Will whose attempted through-the-legs-lay-up went hideously wrong and resulted in him making a last ditch pass to a completely unmarked breeze block in the back wall. One technique I did pick up from Will was the look-one-way-pass-the-other-way dummy. It would have worked wonders when I tried it, had I had the least bit of coordination, or any real idea of where my teammates were.

By the end of the game, despite spending most of the last quarter marking and being marked by an equally exhausted Rich Hughes on the halfway line, I was utterly spent. The basketball had been fun, but for those of us for whom the evening was presenting two relatively new sports, volleyball was the winner by a country mile. The pub was fun too, but then we all knew that anyway.

There are two questions I get asked a lot in the course of doing this challenge. One is “what’s your favourite event so far?” and the other is “are there any you have done that you want to do again once you’re finished?” After Friday night, volleyball is at the top of both lists.

Huge thanks to everyone from the volleyball club who came along to help out and then stayed to make up the numbers in the basketball. Thanks also to the legion of volunteers who came from far and wide (well, as far as Nottingham, and as wide as Simon) and helped make it a really fun night.

Volleyball
The Ultimate Olympian’s Dirty Half Dozen lost narrowly to Simon Bentley’s Screaming Spikes (25-21, 22-25, 15-11). Non-professional Man of the Match: based on sheer enthusiasm (two of his most impressive plays came while he was sitting on the substitute’s bench) the award has to go to Simon Bentley.

Basketball
The Ultimate Olympian’s Fearless Five had their asses handed to them by Will Clapton’s Dunking Donuts (65-35*). Non-professional Man of he Match: even though he only stayed for the first half, Michael “Air” Weatherhead, who is now officially annoyingly good at swimming, volleyball and basketball.

*score estimated later in the pub - may not be entirely accurate

Baskolleyball

2007-01-19T14:38:00.000Z

Before I bore you to death with all the Olympic sport I haven’t done this week, get your diary out and make a note. At 7PM on Friday 30th March 2007 at the Oxford University Sports Centre (OUSC), there will be an Ultimate Olympian double bill.

The first event will be a game of volleyball, and the second a game of basketball. Details of who will be participating are sketchy at the moment, but if you want to be considered, regardless of your age, gender or ability, send an e-mail and I’ll put you on the list of hopefuls.

I’ve been in the gym and the pool a lot over the last week, but I haven’t ticked off any events yet. As ever, real life (as I believe it’s called) keeps getting in the way, but, thanks to Jessie at the OUSC, I have at least set a date for the Baskolleyball evening.

Making Waves - or not...

2007-01-10T14:58:00.000Z

Saturday morning was supposed to be back to rowing porridge. I took it (relatively) easy the night before, got to sleep (relatively) early and leapt from my bed in the morning full of energy and ready to go. Sort of.

Even the pounding rain and gentle wafting of the gale-force wind didn’t put me off and I bravely battled across town for an hour to get to the boatyard on time. Once there, I was rather tersely informed that there wouldn’t be any rowing that day “obviously” because there was “too much water”.

I was disappointed (although the river did look particularly dirty and angry so I wasn’t entirely distraught), but I was awake and dressed for action, so I went to the gym instead and then for a swim. It would seem that Saturday morning is a very good time to do both of those things – both the gym and the pool were almost empty.

I went swimming again last night. This not smoking lark is great for the energy levels, but not so hot for the writing skills. I can hardly finish a thought.

The main purpose of this post wasn’t to update you on how little has changed since last I wrote, but to link to this amusing piece from NewsBiscuit. Go there and be entertained – there’s nothing of that sort to be had around these parts today.

Comeback Kid

2007-01-04T14:51:00.000Z

Some of the more astute among you may have noticed that I have been absent from these pages for a while. As ever, I have excuses aplenty – I’ve been busy at work, I’ve been busy in the pub, it’s cold outside – and as usual, they are all rubbish so I’ll spare you. The long and the short of it is that I’m back.

Looking for some inspiration, I discovered a sporting comeback that may be hard to top. At the start of the 1972 Munich Olympics, Lasse Virén, a 23-year-old Finnish policeman from the small village of Myrskyla, was not widely known. The heats of the 10,000 metres constituted his Olympic debut.

He qualified, but when he stumbled and fell just before the halfway mark in the final his chance of victory seemed to have gone.

The Tunisian Mohamed Gammoudi (who had won the 5,000 metres at the 1968 Olympics) tripped over Virén and gave up two laps later. But the Finnish runner calmly got to his feet and chased his way back into contention, overtaking Britain's David Bedford, the long-time leader, to not only win the gold medal, but set a world record of 27min 38.4sec.

Ten days later, he also won the 5,000m (in an Olympic record time) - a double that he repeated in Montreal in 1976.

You can watch the whole race in three parts [1, 2, 3] courtesy of YouTube, but if all you want to see is how badly he fell over, skip to three and a half minutes into Part 2.

I can't promise a comeback on quite such a spectacular scale, but I can promise a quickening of the pace around here. I'm going to need something to keep me occupied now that I've stopped smoking again.

Another False Start

2006-10-11T20:35:00.000+01:00

I feel duty bound to point out that I didn't drink all of that.

Having been told by the nice lady on the phone the previous evening that the track would be free from 6PM until 7:30PM, I arranged to meet Kev (who now has a blog all of his very own) and Gareth (who I think of as “enthusiastic”, but Kev very rudely refers to as “loud”) there shortly after six.

Much to our dismay, we were unable to run in the end as the track was covered in some sort of unmoveable, slightly smelly, and largely unsightly organic matter. I think it’s called “students”, but I can’t be sure.

Unfortunately, we had to go straight to the pub.

Needless to say, after a few beers, it seemed like a good idea to head back to the track and see if we could squeeze in a quick race before they closed. Sadly, we were a little too late and not quite drunk enough to avail ourselves of the hole in the fence. There was nothing else for it but to head back to the pub and consider doing the whole thing again next week.

Like some latter day Steve McQueen, Kev reckoned there was a bit of a blind spot.

The plan that was hatched may have been slightly alcohol-fuelled, given that it involved going back next week at exactly the same time. In the cold light of day, it occurred to me that we might encounter the same problems then that we dealt with so pathetically last night.

Athletics - 800m Preview

2006-10-10T11:49:00.000+01:00

"That was lovely... fancy a Chinese?"

It would seem that the pace of the action around here isn’t quick enough for some people, so in an effort to keep things ticking over, tonight will see a bit of true Ultimate Olympian action – that is to say, some shambolic, poorly thought out, hurriedly executed sport followed by a trip to the pub with Kev from Sobell House.

On the spur of the moment, a gauntlet was thrown down, and tonight Kev and I go head to head over 800 metres at the Iffley Road track, the scene of Sir Roger Bannister’s most celebrated mile. The event was chosen because it’s short enough to not hurt too much (despite a complete lack of training), it’s short enough to not take too long (despite the new licencing laws, the pubs don’t stay open forever you know), and we don’t need any special equipment (like starting blocks).

Probably the most famous 800m race in the Olympics was the final in 1980, when Steve Ovett beat Seb Coe (pictured above pretending to like each other and wearing some particularly fetching gear). Coe had been the favourite to win the 800m and was gutted to only take silver – “There is only one medal that counts. I have to make sure it does not happen again.” – but a few days later, he faced Ovett again in the 1,500m (Ovett’s speciality) and destroyed him.

Tonight, I expect Kev - the Multiple Marathon Man – will be destroying me. I have two goals. The first is, as ever, to run the race in less than double the world record time. The current record is 1:41.11, set by Wilson Kipketer in 1997, so I’ll need to complete two laps of the track in less than 3:22.22. I think that’s possible. The second goal is to avoid getting lapped. I might struggle with that one.

"You're gonna need a bigger boat..."

2006-10-10T10:58:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago, when I first met Tom and Nick from the Hinksey Sculling School, they warned me that sculling is addictive. They warned me that it was a hard thing to just try once and then cast aside. I’d be drawn to it, they said. I ought to be careful, they said. From the outside looking in, I admired their love of their sport, but I didn’t believe a word of it.

To me rowing (and sculling) was all about power. The bigger man wins. Yes, there is technique involved, but if you’ve trained harder and lifted more weights, you can make up for deficiencies in technique in a way that a technically gifted lightweight could never counteract.

On Saturday, for the first time, I got into a proper boat and headed out on the river. It didn’t take long before I realised how wrong my preconception about power was, and how right Tom and Nick were about the addictiveness of the sport.

The boat (pictured above) was a double scull. As I climbed down into it I felt the same disconcerting wobble of boat-on-water that I had previously felt climbing into a racing kayak in Nottingham last April.

Nick sat behind me in the front of the boat (if you can figure that out) and we pushed off. He explained how to keep the boat stable - hands in front, like Marcel Marceau climbing a ladder that isn’t there, left hand slightly above right - and demonstrated how the slightest lifting of either hand would make the boat tip to the opposite side.

Having established how not to fall in, and run through some light jargon (every sport has its own little language, littered with shibboleths to distinguish those in the know from those in the dark), we set off up the river.

I say we set off – really, Nick set off as I balanced the boat with my newfound blade (not oar) skills. A short dash down the river later, Nick decided he’d had enough of doing the hard bit and started talking me through how to scull.

What I did was very basic. The seat is on runners, but my legs were to remain locked straight throughout our session. At first, I wasn’t even moving from my hips, just using my arms, and the notion of flattening the blades on the way back wasn’t even entertained. Despite all that, there was a definite thrill involved in being the one powering the boat.

I learnt both my lessons (about power and addiction) almost simultaneously. I quickly realised that all the power in the world (and therefore, a lot of the time I’ve spent recently on the rowing machine or lifting weights) is entirely useless if you don’t know how to apply it. And I clearly didn’t have a clue.

Then, as I felt around with my blades, and splashed, and dug too deep, or missed the water altogether, suddenly, from nowhere, a perfect stroke. Both blades entered the water at the same time, dug just deep enough to get the maximum pull, without digging too deep and causing the boat to lean to one side, and then both blades exited the water together and ripped back, half an inch off the surface, ready to do it all again.

And I was hooked.

Most of my sporting understanding is filtered through golf. The same phenomenon exists there. A complete novice can lift a golf club, waft it around a bit, and if he or she is very unlucky, catch one absolutely flush and be addicted for life. The essence of the addiction is frustration. A glimpse of perfection is granted, but only for long enough to make you feel the need to search for it forever.

Rowing is a sport, like golf, where repetition is key. Above a certain level the difference between one person’s best and another person’s best is irrelevant. Instead, it becomes about who can reproduce their best most frequently, and (crucially) reproduce their best when it really matters.

Redgrave may not have been technically the best rower - or indeed the strongest, or the fittest - but he had in spades what others lacked. He had the ability to deliver his best at the critical moment.

It is the fact that you can sit in a boat for the very first time and produce (entirely by accident of course) something close to a Redgrave stroke that makes rowing addictive. I can watch Zidane with a football at his feet and admire the beauty of it, but can never know how it feels to do what he’s doing. I can watch Federer hit shots on a tennis court that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, but I can only admire it, never experience it.

It goes without saying that I could never attain the Olympic heights scaled by Sir Steve, but at least I can taste it, just for a moment. I can’t decide yet if that taster is a wonderful thing or the dangerous early stages of a crippling addiction. This challenge is going to be hard enough to complete without having to spend time in rehab.

Scull, scull, scull your boat...

2006-10-06T12:30:00.000+01:00

Having spent last Saturday morning zipping up and down the river in a small skiff watching children as young as nine making sculling look incredibly easy, I’m heading back to the Hinksey Sculling School tomorrow to show them a thing or two about how to handle a long, thin boat.

I’m encouraged by how stable the youngsters looked in their single sculls, or at least I was encouraged until Tom (expert coach) pointed out that their centres of gravity are somewhat closer to the waterline than mine is going to be. One doesn’t so much sit in the boat as on it – or next to it in water up to my neck as will most likely be my innovative approach.

There will be no event completion tomorrow – we’re still at the stage of getting me into a boat to see how much work there is to be done before we can go to a proper racing lake to record some times – but I’m looking forward to it. Mostly.

One thing I’ve learnt so far in the course of trying Olympic events is that the more ardently the experts insist that their discipline is "easy to learn but difficult to master", the more likely I am to get either hurt, wet, or both. In April last year, Shaun Cavern, flatwater kayaking guru extraordinaire, kept telling me that his discipline was simple, right up to the point where I was disappearing into the Trent.

The next day, Ian Raspin, slalom kayaking guru extraordinaire, was saying exactly the same thing, even as he was saving me from drowning.

It’s slightly disappointing therefore that Tom Collins, sculling guru extraordinaire, has punctuated nearly every sentence he has spoken to me since we met with the expression "it’s really very easy." For now, I believe him - the kids last week certainly made it look so – but by lunchtime tomorrow, I might be singing a different tune.

Treadmill Tapdance

2006-09-12T08:15:00.000+01:00

All work and no pointless sport make John a dull Olympian. I’m hoping that will all change in the near future - I’ve finished a large project at work that has been hanging over my head all year, and some tentative visits to the gym of late have confirmed that whatever was wrong with my (supposedly ‘good’) knee seems to have gone away again.

In the meantime, to give you a flavour of how I like to dress and behave in the aforementioned gym, here is the video for OK Go’s single Here it Goes (with thanks to all the people who saw it, thought of me for some reason, and e-mailed the link).

Next week, The Kings of Leon Greco-Roman wrestling.

The Deep End

2006-08-28T13:03:00.000+01:00

As you can see, I have been working very hard at the Olympic challenge since we went swimming four weeks ago…

Unfortunately, the “working very hard” bit is true, but sadly I’ve not been working on anything as interesting or fun as all of this. I was also away for a few days playing golf in Holland. Two things of Olympic note occurred while I was there.

The first I’m hoping might not be as much of a problem as it felt like at the time. As I walked onto a tee box, my left knee (the “good” one) made a popping sound and suddenly I couldn’t straighten it (stop me if this is starting to sound familiar). I wiggled it about a bit, there was another pop and everything seemed back to normal. I strapped it up for the rest of the trip and favoured the other leg (”There's a lot of it about, probably a virus, keep warm, plenty of rest, and if you're playing football or anything try and favour the other leg.”).

Then, the morning after I got home, I climbed out of bed only to have it pop out of place again (the knee, not the bed). This time it took me half an hour (and rather more wiggling than I really like to start the day with) to get it back into place; by the time I did, the joint had filled with fluid and it hurt like hell.

Three days working from the sofa with my leg elevated, covered in ice and an assortment of frozen vegetables, seemed to do the trick. The swelling went down, the pain it was causing subsided, and the limp became less Douglas Badder and more Huggy Bear. Now, the limp is gone, the knee feels fine, and last night I even ran about 50 yards at a fair lick to catch a bus.

All of which sounds great, but I’m still feeling a bit like I'm walking around on a time bomb that could have me back in the hospital again at any minute. At least I’d know the drill I suppose.

The other thing of note that occurred in Holland was more of a realisation than an injury (for a change). As I mentioned, I was playing golf, a game I’ve played since I was old enough to draw breath. At one stage in my life I even got reasonably good at it.

These days I’m diabolically bad. There is the occasional flash of something encouraging, but really, when you’re stumbling about in the dark, an occasional flash tends to be more disorientating than helpful.

The thing is, I used to care. I used to get really quite upset on the golf course about how bad I had become. I would break clubs and unleash vitriolic streams of very unsavoury language in the aftermath of a really bad shot (of which there were many). I made a decision a couple of years ago after a particularly embarrassing outburst that I was not only ruining the game for myself, but also making the people I was playing with rather uncomfortable. It had to stop.

I’m delighted to say that it has stopped, and while I was away in Holland my golf was so bad (and I was so far out of contention) that I had plenty of time to think about why it has stopped, and why I’m now wandering about the course like the Dalai Lama ("Big hitter, the Lama") instead of Happy Gilmore.

In the space of a month I had played incredibly badly (even for me) in a tournament in Northern Ireland in front of a bunch of people I used to consider my peers, and then there I was walking around a course in Holland with half my old university team, all of whom had left me for dead by the end of the first nine on the first day. I should have been spitting with rage.

Finally I realised what has made the difference, what has stopped me getting cross, and consequently let me enjoy playing again (or at least enjoy it more than I have done for a while). It’s failure. It’s being rubbish at things. Perhaps most importantly, it’s failing and being rubbish on a regular basis. In short, it’s this challenge.

By forcing myself to try things that I think I can’t do (but sometimes surprise myself with – the BBC’s coverage of this year’s London Triathlon was on TV last week and I watched it with a renewed sense of disbelief that I made it round last year), by constantly putting myself out of my comfort zone, and by having to rely on a lot of help from a lot of people, I’ve come to enjoy trying things, even if I don’t succeed.

As I’ve mentioned previously, that’s what the Olympics are supposed to be all about – trying your best (no matter what Sean Connery had to say in The Rock about "losers" who say that) and not worrying too much about the outcome.

It would seem that the deep end is my new comfort zone, which should make this little lot a piece of cake, right, Ben?

(with belated thanks to my synchronised diving partner for the photos)

P.S. Also thanks to Ben, here's some video footage. Ben, you're either a bad typist or a comic genius - "Ultimate Olumpian"? I might run with that from now on.

Swimming Pictures

2006-08-01T22:39:00.000+01:00

Rather than weave these into the previous post, I thought I'd save you all the trouble of going looking for the shots of me and the boys in our swimming trunks. Brace yourselves.

Fighting fit and ready to go - three days later and the only bit of me that's still sore is the bridge of my nose - note to self: don't buy new goggles the day before you go for a 3 hour swim session. With feet that big, I should have been quicker. Still, nice tan, eh?

Not unlike Eric Moussambani, my diving wasn't ideal. I think I spent the first twenty metres after this one trying to work out if I was in too much pain to continue with the race. I braved it out in the end. I know they're closer to the camera than the rest of me, but I've never noticed just how ridiculously big my feet are. Sideshow Bob-tastic!

Introducing Mr David Hockney on Fuji Finepix... nice work, Mr H.

They say the camera never lies, but I assure you I was trying a lot harder than this photo makes it look like I am. The vent on the right of shot is where they let the sharks out when you're not looking.

The relay team of the gods - from left to right: Mildly Embarrassing McClure, Doggy Paddle Diogo, Iron Mike Butterfly & Blistering Backstroke Ben. I can assure you that the pool at Crystal Palace is not on a slope - the only man we could find to take our picture had a worn down wooden leg.

There is some video to come, but I'm still working on the technical glitches.

Eight Events in One Day

2006-08-01T01:09:00.000+01:00

Thorpedo in the Water!

Usually, before I do an event, I write a preview. On this occasion, I was pushed for time; but I was also planning to attempt eight (swimming) events in one day, so thought eight previews might be a little much. I know, however, that a certain other John likes a good preview, and it was his birthday last week, so rather than disappoint him altogether, I thought I’d mash the previews through the review and see how that comes out. Probably as the longest blog entry in history – brace yourselves.

Swimming is one of the Olympic sports in which I have a hero. For my money swimmers don’t get anything like as much recognition as they should – I suppose they’re too anonymous when they’re in the water, or maybe people just don’t understand how incredibly fit and dedicated the best ones are.

My swimming hero hasn’t been my swimming hero for very long, but I can’t conceive of anyone ever being able to replace him at the top of the list (which roughly, from second place, pans out: Thorpe, Moorhouse, Phelps, Goodhew, Eric “The Eel” Moussambani).

He has won eight Olympic medals (4 gold, 2 silver, and 2 bronze), nine World Championship medals (3 of each), and sixteen European Championship medals (8 gold, 3 silver, and 5 bronze); and yet, the chances are, you’ve never heard of him. He holds 14 British records, 8 European records, and 7 world records. He is Sascha Kindred.

His twin brother, Timo, did the triathlon with me last year. Like Timo, Sascha’s an impossibly nice man. Unlike Timo, Sascha has cerebral palsy. They’d both kick your ass in the pool – on Saturday, I went to Crystal Palace to have a go in a 50-metre pool, clock my times, and find out by how much.

My day began at 06:30 – usually, if I see this time of the day, it means I’ve had a great night out and it’s time to get some rest, but today it heralded something that I believe is referred to as ‘Saturday morning’. It was a shock to discover that the world not only exists, but also manages perfectly well without me before lunchtime at the weekends. I gathered my thoughts, and my high-energy foodstuffs, and headed to London on the bus with Michael and Diogo.

We arrived at the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre (which, for all the signposts it doesn’t boast, ought to be renamed the Crystal Maze National Sports Centre) by about 10:30, in time to meet Ben, the fourth member of what would prove to be a remarkable relay squad.

We paid our money and made our way into the depths of the swimming pool complex. The whole place is like a man who has been living alone for too long – it’s a bit frayed at the edges, nothing is quite as clean as it ought to be, and there’s a funny smell that you don’t really want to inhale for long enough to be able to describe.

Despite all that, the sheer scale of a 50-metre swimming pool is impressive when you are used to training – all right, when you occasionally swim – in a 25-metre one. It looks big, but somehow, it also looks manageable (appearances, it later turned out, can be deceptive). Perhaps what made it seem manageable was the constant spectre of the 10 metre diving platform, which seemed anything but manageable, lingering behind us throughout.

We weren’t there to dive though – we’d been told we couldn’t without being part of a club or receiving instruction (which costs an arm and a leg; ironic, given that these are exactly what you might lose if you tried it without help) – but both Ben, who has agreed to be the other half of the synchronised dives, and I could hardly look away from the diving pool throughout the 3 hour swim session.

By the end, I think we had convinced ourselves that the 3 metre springboards present no real problem, but that even the steps up to the 10-metre board look frightening, especially when you consider how tricky they might be to negotiate backwards with your tail firmly planted between your legs – never mind trying to do all that in time with your partner.

But I digress – the mission on Saturday was in the other pool – eight events in one three-hour session.

Event 1 - 200m Freestyle
Ian Thorpe’s World record – 1 minute 44 seconds
My time – 4 minutes 24 seconds
% Olympian – 40%

The first thing to note about freestyle is that, as the name implies, the swimmer can use any style he or she likes, and touch the wall with any part of the body at the turns and the finish. This was one of many useful little titbits I picked up from Dave Wallechinsky’s excellent book last night, and would come in very handy during this first event.

Mark Spitz - how much faster might he have been without the 'tache?

This event was Mark Spitz’s third of seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The winner in the 1988 games was the largely unfancied Duncan Armstrong of Australia. He beat the mighty Matt Biondi into third place, breaking the world record in the process, by using a rather ingenious tactic. He was assigned lane 6, with Biondi inside him in lane 5. At his coach’s suggestion, Armstrong swam as close to Biondi’s lane as he could for the first 150 metres - “I just sucked into his trough and bodysurfed the first 100 metres” – before slingshotting his way to the front with 20 metres to go.

My race plan was slightly different, and based rather more loosely around the notion of not drowning. I dived in and felt very good for 20 metres, despite the absence of Matt Biondi in the next lane. I was breathing every two strokes and felt comfortable. Then I felt a little short of breath, so I switched to breathing with every stroke. Then I realised I wasn’t even going to make it to the end of the pool if I didn’t switch to breaststroke. Which was quite embarrassing. In the end, I touched home in a time of 4 minutes 24 seconds. Which was also quite embarrassing. Thorpe could have swum twice as far in the same time, and still have had time to get out and throw a couple of shrimps on a barbie in the time it took me.

Event 2 - 4 x 100m Freestyle
South African World record – 3 minutes 13 seconds
Our time – 6 minutes 51 seconds
% Olympian – 47%

Coming into the 2000 Olympic final, the USA had won this event every time it had been held. Despite being 6 tenths of a second down with 50 metres to go, and having won the 400m individual freestyle less than an hour earlier, a 17 year-old Ian Thorpe swimming the anchor leg for Australia somehow managed to overtake Gary Hall of the US to claim the first ever non-US victory for Australia… in Australia. There’s a rumour a few beers were drunk that night, but I’m not sure I believe it.

So good they made it into a stamp.

This event afforded me some help, in the shape of three other swimmers. Despite Michael’s best (and very impressive) efforts, we still didn’t manage to sneak inside the double-the-world-record pace we had tentatively set as a target in each event. It probably didn’t help that I was still doing breaststroke.

Event 3 – 100m Breaststroke
Brendan Hansen’s World record – 00:59.30
Sascha Kindred’s World record – 01:22.98
My time – 1 minute 58 seconds
% Olympian – 50%

He never wanted to be a swimmer for a living; he wanted to be... a LUMBERJACK!

Duncan Goodhew fell out of a tree when he was 10 years old, an accident that caused him to lose all his hair, which never grew back. Bullied at school for being bald and dyslexic, Goodhew went to Moscow in 1980 determined to raise two fingers to his juvenile detractors by winning a gold medal as shiny as his head. He won the final by four tenths of a second.

As a twelve year-old, Adrian Moorhouse watched David Wilkie win a gold medal in the 200m breaststroke and was inspired to start training in earnest. In 1984, he swam a disappointing final and finished fourth. While he was still in Los Angeles, he got a telegram from his old Sunday school teacher – “Very bad luck, all proud of you. There will be a next time.” – which he kept and later tucked into the box that contained his gold medal from the 1988 games.

This event is one I finally felt reasonably comfortable with throughout. I saved a bit for the finish and just about managed to scrape inside the target time. I was growing increasingly tired by this point however. It’s all very well not eating before you swim, but it doesn’t do much for the energy levels.

Event 4 – 4 x 100m Medley
US World record – 3 minutes 30 seconds
Our time – 8 minutes14 seconds
% Olympian – 43%

This event wasn’t on the list for this trip, but Michael took me aside and uttered in a hushed and confidential tone that he might be able to do 100 metres of butterfly if I wanted to try for the medley relay. With Ben having shown himself to be an expert backstroker, and Diogo kind enough to let me do the breaststroke leg (is it just me, or is this sport riddled with innuendo?), in true Ultimate Olympian style, we jumped at the chance to have a go at something unplanned.

Ben led off with an expertly executed backstroke leg. I followed up with an average breaststroke leg, but all was really just preamble to Mighty Michael (as he shall henceforth be known) and his butterfly leg. He swept away from the start like some over-excited (and possibly slightly epileptic) dolphin – which sounds bad, but actually that’s just what perfectly executed butterfly looks like. The three of us watched in awe as he turned and just kept on coming. He was tired when he finished, but it was, all sarcasm aside for once, one of the most impressive sporting things I’ve ever seen.

Diogo brought us home with some mighty fine freestyling, someone noted down the time, but I don’t think any of us cared – we’d witnessed something a bit special, no matter how long it took.

Event 5 – 200m Breaststroke
Brendan Hansen’s World record – 2 minutes 9 seconds
Sascha Kindred’s World record – 2 minutes 56 seconds
My time – 4 minutes 29 seconds
% Olympian – 48%

Sascha Kindred - collector of world records.

In 1976, 12 of the 13 men’s swimming events were won by the USA. The only one that wasn’t was won by Scotland’s David Wilkie who set a new world record and became the first British swimmer for 68 years to win an Olympic title (and, in so doing, inspired a young Adrian Moorhouse).

My ambitions were slightly lower. Despite the encouragement of Ben, Diogo and Michael as I came to the finish, I didn’t quite manage to be half an Olympian. There’s video of this one, but you’ll have to wait a day or two while we work out how to rotate it through 90 degrees so you can see it!

Event 6 – 4 x 200m Freestyle
Australia’s world record – 7 minutes 4 seconds
Our time – 16 minutes 55 seconds
% Olympian – 42%

We revised our target for this one to 17 minutes. I think we all thought we were very unlikely to beat that mark when we started, and with the best will in the world, Diogo, Ben and I were a little glum as Michael set off for the final leg with 14 minutes already elapsed. Halfway through his final length, I started getting excited. If he didn’t tie up in the final 25, there was a chance we might do it… all right, there was a chance Mike might do it for us. In the end, he didn’t even make it tense, swimming a final leg of 2 minutes 55 seconds to see us smash the mythical 17-minute mark. The man’s a machine.

Event 7 – 50m Freestyle
Alexander Popov’s world record – 21.64 seconds
Sascha Kindred’s British record – 33.06 seconds
My time – 61 seconds
% Olympian – 35%

Excuse me, Mr Popov - how many Olympic medals did you win?

Re-introduced in 1988, the 50m freestyle inspired one of Olympic swimming’s great rivalries. For the best part of 15 years, Matt Biondi and Alexander Popov traded titles and world records like men possessed. Very exciting it was too, but my favourite 50m freestyler is Samson Ndayishimiye of Rwanda who, in the games of 2000, was the slowest competitor (recording a time of 38.76 seconds). The highlight of the games for him was swimming in a clean pool that was two and a half times longer than the dirty hotel pool he had trained in.

Having recorded a 57 second split in the first half of my 100m breaststroke, I was confident I could beat the minute mark in this one. If I’d done breaststroke, perhaps I would have done, but for some reason I stuck to crawl, despite tying up like Houdini in the final 10 metres and missed the minute mark by the narrowest of margins. I’d stopped being embarrassed by that stage. I was just tired.

Event 8 – 100m Freestyle
Pieter van den Hoogenband’s world record – 47.8 seconds
Sascha Kindred’s PB – 1 minute 13 seconds
Eric “The Eel” Moussambani’s time in Sydney 2000 – 1 minute 52 seconds
My time – 2 minutes dead (which is what I nearly was by the end)

Pieter van den Hoogenband - Holland's aqua-weightlifting sensation.

There was much mocking of Eric the Eel at the start of the session. How we laughed at his unfortunate attempt to qualify for the latter stages of the 2000 games! How we slowly stopped laughing so much as we realised I hadn’t a snowflake’s chance of beating his time.

Eric arrived in Sydney expecting to swim in the 50m event, but his coach decided at the last minute that he should do the 100m instead. Good in theory, but the fact that Eric had never swum that far in one go before in his life might have given him pause. Eric’s heat contained just three swimmers, but when the other two both produced a false start and were disqualified, Eric was left to swim the heat alone against the clock.

Despite a slightly bellyflopped dive into the pool and swimming with his head above the water, he somehow nailed the first 50 metres in under 41 seconds, but he’d used up just about all his energy and the second lap became the stuff of legend. 5 metres from the finish, despite his continued thrashing, Eric stopped moving forward. Exhausted, disorientated, and probably mildly embarrassed, he was essentially treading water. The officials thought about stepping in.

Then the Sydney crowd came to life and adopted themselves a new hero. Their bellowing and encouragement somehow carried him to the finish. His time was more than 40 seconds slower than the next slowest participant’s, and seven seconds slower than Pieter van den Hoogenband’s winning time in the 200m event.

It was funny to watch, and you loved him for it. You loved him even more when you later read that having waved shyly to thank the crowd, Eric went back to the changing rooms and cried.

To his credit, inspired by the subsequent kindness shown to him by the public and many of the elite swimmers, Eric stuck at it and, in the 2001 World Championships, recorded a time in the 50m freestyle of 31.88 seconds.

Eric Mousammbani - not the fastest, but comfortably quicker than me.

There’s some video here – with commentary in French especially for the Dubrannas.

Alexander Popov was somewhat better than Eric. After Popov won the 1996 100m freestyle (his second successive gold in that event) an American reporter asked him to name his favourite actor or actress. “This is an American question,” snapped Popov. “I don’t dream about actors and actresses. They should dream about me. I am reality, they are not.” Ironically, he had just become the first repeat winner of the 100m freestyle since Johnny Weissmuller, who you probably know better as the actor who played Tarzan.

Johnny Weissmuller (with his wife and his coach).

And so we reach the end of this titanic blog entry. Its length is related to its subject, and I’m hoping that by the time you get to this point (if you do) that you’re as tired as I was when I finished those eight events.

Now, if I can just knock off another 5 events quickly, there will be less than a hundred left to complete!

Anyone for tennis?

2006-06-30T00:37:00.000+01:00

Yesterday saw the playing of two very important tennis matches. One of them involved one of the best tennis players I’ve ever seen, playing against a complete no-hoper from Oxford; the other was between Roger Federer and Tim Henman. The results weren’t entirely dissimilar.

I have a rough rule of thumb that any sport for which a gold medal at the Olympics is not the ultimate achievement in the sport ought not to be in the games. This rule certainly applies to tennis, which was included in the first modern games of 1896, but then dropped after the 1924 games, only to return in Seoul in 1988.

That said, there are a few entertaining stories from the history of the men’s singles tournament.

John Pius Boland (who later became an MP and ardent proponent of Irish independence) was a student at Christ’s College, Oxford in 1896. He went to Athens on holiday and to watch the first modern Olympic games. At dinner in his hotel one night he met a Greek man from Egypt who was playing in the tennis tournament and persuaded Boland to enter too. As chance would have it, they met in the final. Boland considered forfeiting the match, but in the end thought better of it and turned up to beat his new friend 6-2, 6-2 and become the first Olympic tennis champion.

In 1906, by virtue of three walkovers, a Dutchman called Guus Kessler made it all the way to the semi-final round, where he lost 6-0, 6-0.

The 1908 title was lifted by Arthur “Wentworth” Gore who remains the oldest person ever to have won a Wimbledon singles title (aged 41, in 1909) and the oldest person ever to play in a Wimbledon singles final (aged 44 in 1912). In fact, he played in every Wimbledon tournament that was held between 1888 and 1927. Perhaps Tim Henman can take comfort from the thought that Gore won the title 21 years after first playing in the event.

In the Olympics of 1948 and 1952, an Iranian boxer, Emmanuel “Mike” Agassi lost in his first fight both times. In 1996, his youngest son, Andre, won Olympic tennis gold in Atlanta, beating Sergi Bruguera in the final 6-2, 6-3, 6-1.

Gareth manages to serve and give me the fingers at the same time.

I wasn’t quite as bad as Guss Kessler last night, but it was a close run thing. Gareth is easily the best tennis player I know. He’s also a lot more competitive than he pretends to be. I could tell it rather annoyed him (even if it didn’t remotely worry him) when I broke his first service game. At 1-1 in the first set, I was feeling pretty good. It was all rather downhill from there.

Dizzy Gillespie playing the trumpet.

The photos (thanks, Mike!) later revealed that I blow my cheeks out like Dizzy Gillespie hitting a high note every time I hit the ball. I’ve no idea why I do that – I certainly don’t try to – but even once our esteemed photographer had pointed it out mid-game, I couldn’t stop doing it. Or thinking about the fact that I was doing it.

Me dealing with a tricky backhand, in D flat.

Perhaps it was this mental lapse, or possibly Gareth’s considerable talent advantage, that led to me losing the first set 6-1 and the second 6-0.

My first encounter with tennis was watching Wimbledon with my mother – who, for two weeks every summer, becomes the most ardent tennis fan imaginable. She wept when Ivanisevic won in 2001. But then, so did I. And so did he. I’m choking up now just thinking about it.

My first racket was given to me by my father (I’m not sure how old I was) when he came back from a trip to Belgium armed with a pair of Donnay rackets – a small one for me, and an even smaller one for my sister. Largely, while mum was glued to the television and enraptured by Dan Maskell’s exceptional commentary for those two weeks, Caroline and I were in the garden winning Wimbledon ourselves over and over.

I must have been running out of puff by then.

Having decided that it was a sorry state of affairs that I no longer owned a tennis racket (and that I’d been unable to borrow one from any of my friends), at lunchtime yesterday I went and bought myself one. For £28, I didn’t think I’d be getting much worth writing home (or in one’s blog) about, but it’s an incredible piece of kit.

Fully strung, it weighs just over 300 grams – that’s less than a can of coke – and, even though I didn’t demonstrate it much when we played, it feels capable of great things. As the third set marched on to the same tune as the previous two, my new purchase had its moment of glory.

It may have been a moment of glory, but I still looked like Loius Armstrong trapped underwater when it happened.

0-2 down, and serving at 30-15, it produced an ace to Gareth’s (left-handed) forehand. This was exciting on several levels. For one thing, it was one of only a handful of first serves with which I managed to hit the court (let alone the service box); for another, it gave me two game points; but most importantly, it put me ahead in the ace count, 1-0.

I went on to win the game (my second and last of the match), but Gareth had new worries, and the final games became all about him trying to ace me, and me trying my best not to be aced. In what looked likely to be his final service game (at 4-1) he put what was likely to be his final first-serve (at 40-15) into the net. I secretly smirked.

Then he aced me (quite beautifully) with his second serve. The final game of the match consisted of me trying to ace him with every (first and oh-so-inevitable second) serve, so he won that to love without hitting a shot and the match was all over. Just as in the badminton a little less than two years ago, he had beaten me quite soundly.

Tennis may or may not belong in the Olympic games – and it’s a frustrating game for two people of differing abilities to play against each other – but last night was a lot of fun, and I’m delighted to report that my knee withstood not only the tennis, but also the moment of madness that saw Gareth and I have a 400 metre race round Bannister’s track on our way home (he won that too by the way – Gareth, not Bannister - by about 50 metres).

Result of Tennis - Men’s Singles
Gareth Forber (GBR) beat John McClure (GBR) 6-1, 6-0, 6-1

Le Plus Important...

2006-06-28T12:18:00.000+01:00

An unlikely setting for an epic sporting encounter...

Having played a leading role in most of my convalescence, it was probably fitting that alcohol should once again have been involved in what I hope was the final stage. At five-thirty on Sunday morning, after a French wedding that will live long in the memory, all the necessary elements for recovery finally aligned.

It takes a clever friend with a very special brand of madness I can’t resist to understand that, after a wedding and when everyone else has gone to bed, the best possible thing to do is play badminton in the garden under floodlights until the sun comes up – that kind of thing seems obvious to me, and infinitely preferable to anything as mundane as sleeping, but surprisingly, we were the only players.

Badminton evolved from an Indian game that had no rules or defined playing area. There was no winner, just one, simple, shared objective – keep the shuttlecock in the air. It adhered perfectly to the Olympic ideal that values taking part above winning.

We played in the spirit in which the game was invented, across what had earlier served as a homemade dance floor. Neither of us scored a point, but I doubt we could have made more effort had it been an Olympic final.

I leapt for high shots, I lunged to retrieve the short and wide ones – I even managed to break a racket (pardon, Nico!) trying to retrieve a shot that flew a little too close to the marquee – and all without a single twinge in either my knee or my competitive spirit.

Later in the day I took a walk, half expecting my knee to be stiff, but if anything it felt better. I tried running a couple of hundred metres. It hurt a little, but then so did the other one; it’s been a while, and I wasn’t wearing running shoes.

I’m writing this as I sit on a train on my way back to the UK. I hope that tomorrow I’ll find an hour after work to go to the gym and move the knee-recovery process on. Who knows? Maybe I might even find the time to do some events before the end of the summer and you can all start reading about something other than the wretched state of my health.

The regular (frequently disappointed) visitor to this site will know that, in addition to being injured, I have been rather lazy recently. As ever, the excuses are legion but dull. I have been in need of some inspiration (I even thought about taking another trip to Ikea), and this weekend it has arrived with a vengeance.

All weekend, I played games as they should be played - trying to win, but too busy enjoying the attempt to worry about whether or not it was successful. Sport provides a vehicle for making new friends and basking in the warm glow of old ones. Put a man in a garden with a small child and you have a man and a child looking at each other awkwardly; add a ball to the equation and suddenly there is laughter and play, and later there will be stories: of triumph and disaster, of near misses and moments of brilliance, of mistakes and achievements – of life.

I played this Finnish game in France with a Mexican bandit. It was that kind of weekend.

***

UPDATE - I didn't make it to the gym last night, but tonight Gareth has very kindly agreed to beat me at tennis. I don't have time to write a preview - if you really need one, tune in to BBC1, BBC2 or BBCi any time for the next fortnight and you'll soon work out what tennis is all about.

Archery - 70 metre Individual

2006-05-20T19:01:00.000+01:00

As Will drove us through the wilds of Witney, we passed this pub. The rain was coming down quite hard, but doing nothing to dampen the wind. I suspected the pub might be as close as we would get to anything archery related last night, but thankfully I was wrong.

After some initial confusion when we arrived at Witney Rugby Club about where exactly the archers were hanging out (there was some sort of caravan convention being held on one of the pitches), we eventually found a couple of members of the Windrush Bowmen (a number of whom later turned up and were clearly women).

People in clubs tend to be either incredibly welcoming and eager for you to join in whatever it is they’re doing, or incredibly aloof and eager for you to go away. I’m delighted to report that the Windrush Bowmen (and bow-women) were all very firmly of the former persuasion. Within ten minutes of finding them, I was handed a target frame and told to follow the man with the tape measure while he very exactly measured out the 70 metres we needed.

The rain came and went, but the wind persisted as this same man gave me a very rough idea of what to do. I shot a couple of arrows into a target that was only ten metres away to give me a feel for what I was doing. I assume doing so was also designed to be an exercise in confidence boosting; if it was, it nearly backfired horribly as my second arrow only just hit the target.

Having established that the sights on the bow were essentially meaningless at this stage, as I’d probably miss the long target anyway, my mentor decided I should get on with it and give them all a laugh. I think he was a little surprised when my first three arrows only missed by feet instead of yards. The gentle mocking turned to gentle encouragement as we walked down to retrieve them (from the ground).

My fourth shot was dead straight (“as an arrow” in fact), but missed slightly high. My fifth shot, however, hit the target and I may have yelped ever so slightly. By this stage, I could no longer really see properly for all the rain on my glasses, so it was the noise the arrow made as it hit that produced the little yelp of triumph. The sixth shot missed high again, but I didn’t really care by then. I walked, rather faster this time, down to retrieve the arrows and to see how many points I’d scored.

The grapefruit was safe, in fact, you could have nailed a prize-winning marrow to the target and it would have survived unscathed, but I’d hit the outer black, and that’s worth three points. I trotted back to the other end, almost oblivious to the rain, to shoot what I promised the patient Bowmen would be my last three arrows.

I missed with all three. The wind was getting up, the members of the club were waiting to use the range, and the rain just wouldn’t go away. It was time to call it a day. Somehow, the photos make it look like it was a reasonably pleasant evening weatherwise. It wasn't. For a bit of archery footage, and some indication of how strong the wind was, take a look at the video.

I scored three points with my nine arrows. Assuming that I had gone on scoring at the same rate (which, as assumptions go, is reasonably heroic) for the full 72 arrows of the Olympic qualifying event, I would have scored 24 points. In 2004, at the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, the Korean Im Dong Hyun broke the world record with a score of 687 points (out of a possible 720). That’s a hell of a lot of grapefruits.

Of the fifteen events I have tried so far, archery has shot to the top of the list of things I’d like to try again sometime; maybe next time on a dry, windless, sunny evening.

Massive thanks to the Windrush Bowmen for their hospitality, and to Will for braving the elements and taking such good photos and video footage. I’m off to Scotland for a few days to continue the rehabilitation of my knee by playing one of the finest golf courses in the world. When I get back, I hope to set about finding some other events I can do while my knee continues to improve.

Archery Preview

2006-05-18T21:51:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will be attempting to have a go at archery. The Olympic archery discipline is contested by shooting at targets 70 metres away. As so often, I’m going to turn to Dave Wallechinsky’s Complete Book of the Olympics to set the scene:

Archery targets are four feet in diameter. The bullseye is 4.8 inches across. This is the equivalent of shooting across three tennis courts laid end to end and hitting a grapefruit.

I think we all know from experience how tough that can be. Only this morning my grapefruit had made it almost to the end of the garden before I managed to get a shot off.

Archery made its first Olympic appearance at the games of 1900, but after the 1920 games it was dropped as an Olympic sport for want of a uniform set of international rules; presumably the French turned up having prepared to shoot grapefruits, while the Canadians were adamant they had been told to practice shooting at bananas. The French-Canadians arrived with a quiver full of arrows, a fruit salad, and their newly appointed national coach, Carmen Miranda.

Fifty-two years later, the archers of the world had settled on a set of rules (and a type of fruit) and the sport made a comeback in 1972 at the Munich Olympics.

Archery is one of the events at which I will cheat ever so slightly. It accounts for two of the 136 events I could have a go at – the individual and the team contest – however, as the team event is merely a replication of the individual event, I’m only going to do the latter.

I’m also going to cheat in the same way I did when it came to shooting clay pigeons (or were they kumquats?); that is to say, I am not going to shoot quite as many times as the athletes at the Olympics do. To win an Olympic gold, an archer would have to first shoot 72 arrows in a qualifying round and then win 6 matches of 18 arrows each.

Assuming there was no need for any playoff arrows to be shot in the event of a tied match, that’s a minimum of 180 arrows, and to my mind, that means just one thing. I'm not going to waste everyone's time by reconfirming how bad I am at archery 180 times.

My hosts tomorrow are the Windrush Bowmen, who shoot at Witney Rugby Club. If you’re in the area, I’d suggest you run away as fast as you can just in case I don’t quite get the hang of it from the start.

This will be my first event since the fencing in November. The lay off has been largely due to bone idleness, but I’ve also been somewhat hampered by my knee injury. I promised an update on that in my last entry, but to be honest there isn’t much new. My knee still hurts if I try to do much with it, but it gets a little better every time I try. I hope and suspect tomorrow’s antics won’t put too much strain on it.

Robin Who?

2006-05-11T14:36:00.000+01:00

The first test match of the summer started at Lords today. In a little over six years, that famous old cricket ground will play host to the 2012 Olympic archery events. Slightly sooner than that (a week tomorrow in fact) Witney Rugby Club will have a similar honour when it plays host to me having a go at archery, thanks to Barry Groves, of the Windrush Bowmen, who has offered to show me through the basics.

From our brief conversation on the phone, I’d say he’s not expecting me to be able to hit the target at all from 70 metres. I suspect he might be right. Will (Clapton, not Scarlet) is going to come along to act as a witness and hopefully capture some footage on the night. In the meantime, I will be spending as much time as I can in the pub playing darts to get my eye in.

A proper update, including the latest on the (improving, but not yet recovered) knee will follow soon – but for now, I’m spending so much time at work that the last thing I want to do when I get home at night is turn on another computer.

I Give Up

2006-04-07T13:11:00.000+01:00

Last summer, after two and a half years without doing so, I started smoking again. The habit crept back into my life very quietly and quickly. Base camp was established a year ago today with a cigar after dinner in Edinburgh (something no one can do anymore). I thought I could leave it at that, and for several weeks, I did.

Then, in May, the assault on the summit began in earnest when I found myself standing in Statue John’s garden sucking desperately at a Marlboro Light whilst anxiously watching the TV through the window - Liverpool were taking (and saving) penalties in the final of the European Cup. I’d managed that single cigar without becoming a smoker again, so I’d be fine to have just one cigarette, wouldn’t I?

The following week, one of my best friends came over to Oxford for a short visit. He smoked then (but has since quit), so I thought I’d just smoke along with him until he went home. And that was all it took – like some latter day Edmund Hillary, nicotine stood atop my lungs - I was smoking again.

There are four types of people in the world: smokers who smoke, smokers who don’t, non-smokers who don’t smoke, and non-smokers who do.

The smokers-who-smoke will generally make no apology for doing so, own at least one Bill Hick’s DVD, and have an armoury of questionable ‘scientific facts’ up their collective sleeve to hurl back at anyone who dares to suggest they ought to quit.

The smokers-who-don’t-smoke are a wretched bunch. They have seen the error of their ways and given up (often for the umpteenth time), but they still long for the emotional crutch, the element of cool, and the downright physical pleasure a cigarette can provide.

The non-smokers-who-don’t smoke are bemused by the whole situation. Some may have coughed their way through a John Player Special behind the bike sheds many moons ago, but most will never have gone near a cigarette in their lives and will blankly refuse to understand what all the fuss is about.

The non-smokers-who-smoke are the people who seem to be able to take it or leave it. They can (and usually do) smoke when they’re out at the weekend, and then go the whole week without even thinking about a cigarette. Everyone hates them. The non-smokers-who-don’t-smoke think they’re every bit as stupid as everyone else who smokes (or wants to); the smokers-who-don’t-smoke want to be able to do what they do, but can’t; and the smokers-who-smoke hate them because they are forever “borrowing” cigarettes.

I will always be a smoker, whether I smoke or not. Last Sunday, after a particularly heavy evening of playing poker, drinking whiskey and smoking disgusting Cuban cigarettes until three in the morning, I felt so sick all day that I didn’t have a cigarette.

Thirteen days later, I still haven’t had one. My sleeping pattern (dreadful at this time of year as a rule anyway) is all over the place, I can’t concentrate on anything for very long without getting distracted, and the other night in the pub I spent the whole evening nervously fingering a box of matches as though someone might at any minute shove a cigarette in my mouth and make me smoke it.

Like it or not, however, I seem to have quit again.

My knee is improving every day, even if it’s not quite happening as fast as I’d been lead to believe that it might. My lungs are shaping up too - I’ve stopped coughing for the first time in six months and the phantom chest pains have disappeared altogether. It’s a radical concept, but maybe if I start taking a bit better care of my body it might stop breaking down on me - and maybe then I could get on with trying some more Olympic events and have something more interesting to tell you on a Friday afternoon!

Other Olympic Projects

2006-03-31T10:13:00.000+01:00

On the off chance that you’ve been living in a box (cardboard or otherwise) for the last year, let me remind you that last July, London was selected as the host venue for the 2012 Olympic Games.

This was great news that brought delight and rapture to a lot of people, many of whom hadn’t realised they cared that much. The day after the announcement the London bombings dampened the celebrations somewhat, but in the weeks and months that followed, there was much chattering (mostly in pubs) around the land. Many wondered about volunteering to help marshal the games, others about how to get tickets – mostly, people just wanted to be there.

On the day of the announcement itself, Mr van de Poll posed the question that was being asked by many other nutters across Great Britain – “what event are we going to compete in?”

This week, an article on the BBC website brought the nation’s attention to Jonathan Phillips, the self-proclaimed 2012 Olympic Competitor. His aims are simply expressed (but I suspect will be harder to realise): “Find a sport, train hard, gain Olympic qualifying standard, convince a country to give me nationality and a place on their Olympic team, raise £1m for charity and be there at London 2012.”

Having a rummage around Jonathan’s site, Statue John found a reference to another Olympic nutter. Nick is the proud owner of 2012 Gold, a website he is using to track his progress. He’s determined to represent Great Britain at archery in 2012 (at Lords) and win a gold medal. The only thing stopping him is that at the start of his campaign he had no “prior competitive experience.”

I have e-mailed both of them in the hope that at some point during our respective quests, we can collaborate. In the meantime, I wish them luck!

I have since been hunting the web for more Olympic nutters. The closest thing I’ve found so far lends itself more to collaboration with the aforementioned Statue John - this sculpture in Sarasota bears the title “Olympic Wannabes”.

Up to this point, I've not been one for putting a load of links in the sidebar to other blogs that I like to read - this isn't a blog about me, it's a blog about what I'm doing - but I may have to start keeping a list of all the other people out there (and I'm sure there must be more of us) with Olympic projects.

***

Knee Update - had the stitches out this morning and am down to using one crutch/walking stick, so making good progress. The nurse who took the stitches out did suggest that maybe I ought to be doing rather more lying around with my leg elevated as it is still pretty swollen, but needless to say I pretty much ignored that.

This Post May Offend Younger Viewers

2006-03-25T12:55:00.000Z

Do I rock at deadlines or what?

Worse than being late, I will warn you now that this post is going to be gross. Not many people enjoy looking at pictures of my legs at the best of times; even less so when one of those legs is rather swollen and slightly stitched in places. Still more people find looking at pictures of surgical procedures distasteful, and the sight of what those procedures removed from the aforementioned swollen leg might be enough to inspire them to revisit their breakfast.

If you’re one of those people, stop reading now. Go and put the kettle on, make yourself a nice cup of tea and watch something harmless on the TV for half an hour until you forget I even mentioned it. If you’re not one of those people, I still apologise for what follows.

I went to the John Radcliffe Hospital on Tuesday morning at about seven-thirty. I was ushered into a room with three other day patients to give a nurse the same answers to a bunch of questions they’d already asked me (no… not that I know of… no… no… yes… about 5 or 6 a day… yes, I know I should… last night at about ten… no… no… no thank you).

Then the anaesthetist arrived and asked me them all again. She also gave me a couple of pills “to remove any excess acid from your stomach and to calm you down.” I wondered which part of me being asleep when she had arrived to talk to me might have indicated any need for the latter.

Shortly after she left, the surgeon and his minion arrived. Clearly asking questions was not their style; they didn’t need to ask me questions, they were here to tell me what was going to happen (again) and to see if I had any questions for them. I spent the explanation (delivered this time by the minion) looking at the surgeon, who spent the explanation looking at the minion, who spent the explanation looking through me at the imagined page from the text book he was clearly remembering it all from.

Having announced their intentions, they strode off looking pleased with themselves. It was hard not to liken their pre-surgery performance to a particularly cocky batter in a baseball game indicating before the pitch which side of the ground he is about to hit the ball out of. I hoped their talent matched their preamble.

I was wheeled off to theatre. The last thing I remember thinking before the anaesthetic took hold was that it had just gone nine o’clock exactly according to the clock I could see and wasn’t it strange how simply injecting me with something as small as that was going to make me pass out completely in the space of a few sec…

While I was under, here’s what Babe Ruth and his able assistant were seeing (I've made it as small as Blogger would let me - if you want a bigger version, click on the image).

I’d love to tell you what’s going on in those pictures, but I’d be lying if I claimed to have a clue. The next thing I had a clue about was a nurse (who was German and must have been pretty as I started trying to talk German to her before I remembered that I can’t) gently waking me up and asking me how I was feeling.

I don’t remember being wheeled back to the day ward – I presume I fell asleep – but that’s where I ended up. I drifted in and out of sleep for an hour or two. I ate a sandwich. I chatted with the other patients as far as that was possible; it must have looked like a narcolepsy ward as we all kept drifting off mid-sentence.

What I did manage to glean was that the others had serious problems compared to mine. One was in the later (but far from final) stages of recovering from “An Alan Smith, but worse” while another had just had the same surgery as me, but only so they can then decide how best to go about repairing his torn cruciate ligament.

As I lay there thinking about how lucky I am that my recovery time will be so much shorter than either of theirs, I also thought about how, when it comes time to play the Olympic football match, I will definitely be playing in goal.

The surgeon arrived shortly after the last day patient was returned to his spot in the room and talked us each through how it had gone and what happens next. Mine went swimmingly. They removed what they had to remove (the “vast majority of the medial meniscus”), left what they could, and expected me to be in good shape when I come back to see them again in six weeks.

At the moment (as you can see) I’m not in such great shape – at least not to look at – but I’m definitely improving each day and have finally laid off the painkillers that would have made an earlier blog entry even more impenetrably dull. I suspect that the first consultant’s guess that I could be doing a bit of light jogging after two weeks might turn out to be somewhat optimistic, but it won’t be too much more than that I hope.

For now though, I’m hobbling about (with crutches if I’m going further than the fridge) very slowly and filled with even more admiration for the athletes in the Commonwealth Games than I was before I couldn’t bend my leg.

If the sight of all that naked, swollen, nasty flesh has you feeling slightly sick, there are some pictures of my niece looking cute at her christening last week here to make you feel better if you’re into that sort of thing.

It's Only the Commonwealths

2006-03-17T22:53:00.000Z

The Commonwealth Games – ‘diet Olympics’ to tide us over between the proper games – kicked off in Melbourne this week. There are several differences between these and the Olympic games: the countries that take part must be part of the Commonwealth, British competitors represent their home regions instead of Great Britain, some of the Olympic events aren’t included in the programme, and some events that don’t feature in the Olympics have pride of place in the Commonwealth games (rugby sevens, for example).

Without doubt, the athletes take these games very seriously – apart from anything else, the opportunity to compete in a games on this scale can only benefit athletes preparing for the Olympics in 2008 – but they’re just not the same.

It was summed up for me in a TV interview I saw with Chris Hoy a few nights ago. He said all the right things throughout the interview until the very end.

“You just hope that all your training will stand you in good stead. You hope to remain calm enough to get out there and perform like you know you can on the night. The last thing you want is to freeze up on the night when this is something you’ve been training for… for four years… effectively.”

That stray “effectively” gave him, and the importance of these games, away. He won the Olympic gold medal in the one kilometre time trial in the velodrome in Athens two years ago. Try as he might to convince us that he has been training for the Commonwealth title for four years, I’m fairly sure that three years ago, when he was getting up early and training his massive heart out all day, it was Athens 2004, not Melbourne 2006, he was thinking of when he was pushing through the pain barrier.

Further testament came after he eventually finished third in the 1km time trial. He was interviewed again, still slightly out of breath from his race. He gave it his all, he said. He couldn’t have asked for more, he said. He felt he did a good time for the conditions and was happy enough with his performance, he said. He didn’t say he wasn’t that bothered and that it was a good building block for the Olympics in two year’s time, but he might as well have done.

Jason Queally was similarly magnanimous having finished second. Himself a former Olympic gold medallist and world champion, he seemed remarkably full of smiles for a man who had just had to settle for his third Commonwealth silver in a row.

They both praised the winner and said they were happy for him. It was hard not to be.

Australian Ben Kersten, having ridden third from last and taken the lead in front of a home crowd, could only sit and watch as the former Olympic and world champion (Queally) and then the reigning Olympic champion (Hoy) tried to better his time. When neither could, Kersten was rendered prostrate on the ground in floods of joyful tears.

And therein lies my problem with the Commonwealth Games – they seemingly mean so much to some, while meaning much less to others. As delighted as I was to see the Australian’s reaction, there was still a bit of me whispering silently at the television “Calm down, mate; it’s only the Commonwealths.”

Having said all that, of course I’ve been glued to the TV since they started and will continue to be at every opportunity until they finish.

The Commonwealth Games always produce some wonderful stories and impressive feats - in beating England in the final to win the rugby sevens gold medal this morning, New Zealand maintained a remarkable unbeaten record in the history of that sport’s involvement in the games – and as cynical as I may sound about how important they are, for many young athletes (like Ben Kersten), this will be their first and biggest taste of a games of any sort.

They are special in their own way and, if they do nothing else, they highlight by way of contrast just how important the Olympics are.

For someone from Britain (or perhaps, in the spirit of the Commonwealth Games I should say ‘Northern Ireland’), another highlight is that when someone from the English team wins a gold medal, we don’t have to sit through that dreadful dirge of an anthem that entreats a God who has better things to do to save a woman who should be more than wealthy enough to be looking after herself.

Land of Hope and Glory is vastly superior, even if the ending sounds like it should segue into the theme from Star Wars.

***

My own athletic prowess has not improved any since last I wrote. I only have a few more days to wait before I finally get the surgery I need to fix my knee. A couple of weeks more taking it easy after that and then hopefully I'll be back to some kind of training in April.

On the plus side, I heard from one of the cyclists interviewed in Melbourne that he finds it extremely beneficial to his training to sleep for 12 hours a day. All this time I've been half an Olympic cyclist and I never knew it.

Bully's Special Prize

2006-03-13T23:14:00.000Z

It has been a slow time for Olympic events of late - I'm injured, I'm lazy, I'm smoking again - all of which is not helpful when you're still 114 events short of your target. At least I have good friends though, one of whom (Mr van de Poll) very kindly bought me some sporting equipment for my birthday in an effort to get me motivated again. I think you'll agree, the man is inspired (see above).

Unfortunately, said sporting equipment hasn't done much to motivate me away from my injured, lazy, smoking ways. The requirement to be in the pub when I'm using my new personailsed darts is slightly hampering my return to the straight and narrow, but what's a guy to do? I can't very well go letting John think I don't really appreciate the thoughtfulness of his gift now can I?

The more observant among you will notice from the tear in the flight featured above that I have at least been throwing said darts with great athleticism.

Surgery is still scheduled for next Tuesday. It will be a corner and I will turn it. I will stop smoking just as soon as I can go running every time I feel the urge to light up, and I will be back making a fool of myself in the name of raising money for Sobell House and entertaining you lot before you know it.

100th Post!

2006-03-13T22:52:00.000Z

After 18 months of the challenge, this is the hundreth post. To celebrate, have some video footage of me falling out of a boat. The footage was shot by Tim last April in Nottingham. This was a racing canoe and the narrowest thing ever to be put in the water. I think I did well to make it the 40 yards I did before this happened.

Nice!

Did I say Friday?

2006-03-13T10:56:00.000Z

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

- Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

Lazy Bones

2006-03-03T17:45:00.000Z

Every day when I get into work, just to ease myself into the day, I go online and surf to several of my favourite websites. Most days, there is something new there for me to look at – whether it’s a link to an interesting article (with an accompaniment of apposite comments from the members of the site) on Sportsfilter, a new statue photo on Stand By Your Statue, or a new set of amusing observations on one or other of my favourite blogs – it’s a rare day indeed when none of them have changed from the day before.

On those rare days however, I find myself feeling quite disappointed. I hadn’t realised until this morning that I may be inadvertently fuelling that sense of disappointment in others. This morning, I surfed to my own site – this site – and, forgetting momentarily that I am the sole contributor, felt disappointed that there wasn’t any new content since the last time I looked at it.

I don’t have much to tell you at the moment - I am still awaiting surgery on my knee (on 21st March), after which I will hopefully not take too long to get back to trying my hand at Olympic events – but it’s an unusual day indeed that I don’t have anything at all to say. As such, I have resolved to make this entry the first in what will hopefully become a Friday routine. No doubt, as the year progresses and I get back into training and eventing, there will be times when I need more than one post in the week, but from now on, loyal (and much abused) reader, regardless of other posts, there will always be one on a Friday.

Having said that I didn’t have much to tell you, I suppose there are a couple of things you might not know about (unless you know me personally – in which case you will be sick of hearing me bleating on about them).

This day last week, I got a call from BBC Radio Oxford at lunchtime to see if I would do a live interview with Sybil Ruscoe on the drivetime show at 4PM. Obliging sort (and media whore) that I am, I agreed to wander (or limp) up to the studio and spent a very pleasant half hour yacking on the radio with the sports-mad Ruscoe.

Statue John recorded the whole show in Real Player, and as soon as I can figure out how to edit out the bits I’m not in (and therefore make the file a manageable size), I will pop it online for you.

I’ve also started writing a monthly 200 words about what I’m doing for the Oxford Courier Journal – a local free newspaper. I’ll scan the first instalment over the weekend and put it on here. The second is due to be published soon.

Otherwise, all is fairly quiet. I’m getting frustrated with my injury now and 21st March seems a long time away. I’m assured that after the surgery I shouldn’t be out of action for more than three or four weeks, but it’s going to take time to build up muscle mass again, and I’ve been limping so long now, it seems odd to imagine walking any other way.

Essentially, I have fallen into the trap that all injured athletes must face. My knee injury should in no way have prevented me from lifting weights or even swimming with a leg float, but I have resorted instead to eating pies, smoking cigarettes and playing x-Box whilst lying on the sofa and feeling sorry for myself.

Part of the problem is getting around – I can get where I need to go, but the limping makes it take longer and tires me quickly – but in truth, that doesn’t seem like such a problem when it is a card game or a night on the beer I’m trying to get to instead of the gym or the pool.

There's a Hole in My Bucket

2006-02-10T11:51:00.000Z

Having flown back from Dubai (where I failed miserably to get to the firing range) on Wednesday, I had an appointment with the knee expert yesterday. My MRIs were back and the diagnosis was complete. There's a hole in my bucket.

The image above demonstrates what a bucket handle tear of the medial meniscus looks like in cross-section from above. That's what I've probably had for quite some time, and have at this very moment.

The image below demonstrates what a displaced bucket handle tear of the medial meniscus looks like in cross-section from above. That's what happened when I knelt down to pull a plug out of a wall a few weeks ago.

My knee has improved a lot since that happened - in fact, my bucket handle tear is no longer displaced, which is obviously great - but I'm walking around on a time-bomb that may explode (or, to be more medically accurate, displace) at any moment.

In short, the cartilage has to come out, but it's not urgent. I've been given the all clear to go to the US and play golf next week as planned, but as soon as I get back, I need to get to the hospital and have an arthroscopy to remove the offending bucket and its dodgy handle.

I mentioned to the surgeon that I have rather a daunting athletic programme lined up in the months to come. He said that was fine, but only if it was a one off - I could probably make it through the training and running of a single marathon, but if I decided to take up marathon running long term, I'd be likely to have arthritis in my knee by the time I'm 35. Likewise, he said, contact sports like rugby or football would have to go too.

I almost found myself being upset by that, until I remembered that I loathe jogging and don't play either rugby or football.

I asked him if I could film the operation and post it on my website. He told me I was a freak, but he didn't say no.

I'm off this afternoon back to Belfast, then (on Sunday) I'm heading to the US with my dad to play some golf (bucket handle permitting) and do some hardcore relaxing. Having failed to find the time in Dubai to visit a shooting range, I will do my utmost to fire a gun while I'm in the states; I hear it's virtually mandatory.

A Shot in the Dark

2006-01-24T14:01:00.000Z

In my current hobbled state, my choice of events to have a go at in the near future has become rather limited (to shooting and archery). Looking down the list of shooting events I still have to complete, I remembered a snippet of information I gleaned from the Oxford University Pistol Club (who only shoot air pistols), namely that two of the events are illegal to perform in this country.

As a direct result of the tragedy in Dunblane in 1996, a law was passed the following year making it illegal in the UK to buy or own a handgun. One consequence of the passing of that law was that British Olympic handgun shooting hopefuls had to find somewhere else to train. At the moment, many of the top shooters practice in Zurich.

I recently read this article by the Guardian’s Richard Williams, which suggests that Britain’s shooters should "stop whinging" about the pistol ban. His argument that a pistol is "fashioned for swift use at close quarters and for ease of concealment: for use, in fact, against another human being" is sound enough, but his suggestion for a solution to the problem of the handgun ban for competitive shooters is less so:

"there is nothing, it seems to me, to prevent the pistol-shooters from transferring their attention and their skills to long-barrelled weapons, thus satisfying the requirements of a perfectly sensible law while indulging their own enjoyment of firing bullets at targets."

Perhaps he would see the flaw in his logic if tomorrow the government introduced a law banning the writing of poorly thought-out columns in national newspapers and suggested he transfer his attention to writing novels in order to indulge his enjoyment of typing words on a keyboard.

Despite this jarring simplification, he raises an interesting point in the article. When the Commonwealth Games were held in Manchester, the shooting events took place (albeit under tight security), and when the games come to London, they will do so again.

I’m no expert on how guns work, but I have a basic understanding of the concept – there are two essential components, the gun and the bullet, which, when combined, turn two otherwise relatively harmless pieces of metal into a deadly weapon.

It’s a suggestion I’ve often heard from a friend who shot at school, and I’m rehashing it in its simplest form, but surely if you keep one lot of harmless metal in one location and the other lot of harmless metal in another location, and then ensure that the only time they ever come together is in the strictly controlled environment of a firing range, the problem would be solved. The shooters could practice their shooting without having to go to Switzerland, and the rest of us could sleep at night knowing that we hadn’t left the door open for another Thomas Hamilton to walk through.

I don’t have the time to wait for a change in the law though, so, when I head to Dubai next week with work, I may see if I can get myself over to the Jebel Ali shooting range and have a go at the 25m rapid fire pistol event. There’s a chance they may be able to help me get the skeet shooting out of the way too. I’ll keep you posted.

Knee update – the knee injury is improving and the swelling has pretty much gone down; my limp is now more man-with-stone-in-shoe than Gestapo officer. I have an appointment with the MRI department on Friday at lunchtime. Hopefully then I will learn the true extent of the damage and whether or not I’ll need to have surgery to fix it.

Limping into the New Year

2006-01-17T20:56:00.000Z

Once again I’ve left it so long that this post should begin with a litany of apologies, excuses and resolutions to do better in future. Once again, that would be boring to write and more boring still to read, so I’ll save us all the trouble and skip to the latest update from the world of pseudo-Olympic foolishness.

Last weekend saw the publication of an article in the Oxford Times for which I did the interviews back in November while my attention was focused on telling the difference between a foil and a sabre. In all honesty, I’d forgotten to buy the newspaper at any point before Christmas and assumed the article had been published and, as usual, ignored.

This time though, as I was halfway out the front door on my way to the pub on a Friday evening, I got a call from Central News – ITV’s regional news programme. They had seen the article in the paper and wanted an interview the following morning that would feature on the lunchtime bulletin. Much to the detriment of my Friday night, I agreed to meet them (or just ‘him’ as it turned out) at the Iffley Road track at 10AM the next day.

It was cold, and wet, and despite my relative abstinence the night before my head hurt. I ran round the track a couple of times, and up and down the home straight a couple of times, and beside the camera a couple of times, and fairly quickly realised that I’m almost as out of shape as I thought I was.

Random-running-footage secured, we did a quick interview before I scurried off into the murky morning in search of a cup of tea, a copy of the previous day’s Oxford Times, and a video recorder at Jamie and Kate’s house.

The story in the newspaper was the usual cobbling together of words I may at some point have used. Much like hearing a recording of your own voice, seeing your words reported in print is only ever disappointing and slightly confusing. You’re sure they sounded better when you said them.

In a similar vein, my debut on ITV as an “And finally…” story was equally cringe worthy. All the well-structured, concise and important things I had to say went out the window the moment the camera was pointed at me and I mumbled something about the challenge being… challenging.

One thing of interest at the time, and even more so since, that I noticed about the TV pictures was the way I was running. Fortunately, the TV really does add pounds, so my Lycra running tights didn’t look quite as ridiculous on screen as they do in the mirror at home, but my running style did make me wonder if maybe I was carrying an injury I wasn’t aware of. I seemed to be labouring a bit on my right side.

Sure enough, having swum a few times at the start of last week and noticed a slight weakness in my right knee, it finally gave way on Sunday night. The knee clicked as I bent it, as it often does, but this time it also hurt, and when I tried to stand up again, I couldn’t.

To cut what has the potential to be a very long story a lot shorter, it would appear on first inspection by a knee surgeon that my medial meniscus (cartilage on the inside of my knee joint) may have torn. It’s possible I did the bulk of this damage months ago when I crashed my bike, and that since then my cartilage has been waiting like some biological time-bomb to explode at the least glamorous moment it could find.

When I fell off my bike, I did so during a three-minute cycle to the shops mere days after surviving 40km of competitive triathlon cycling without so much as a wobble. This time, my knee made it through the stresses and strains of some heavy-duty lunging while I fenced in November, only to snap like a dry twig when I knelt on the floor to remove the modem plug from its socket.

Under normal circumstances, I’d be clamouring for them to get on with repairing or removing the cartilage as soon as possible so I could get back to training for what I hope will be a summer jam-packed with Olympic endeavour. However, the mitigating factor of a long-planned trip to Florida in three weeks time to play golf has me sitting on the sofa with my leg elevated and iced in the hope that somehow it will get strong enough in the interim to allow me to still go.

The surgeon assures me it should be fine if I rest it between now and then. Once I’ve played golf and come home, he will then either repair or remove the cartilage. That’s all very encouraging, but I’m not sure he appreciates quite how violent my golf swing can be.

For the moment though, I’m going for that option, even if it does mean walking around like Herr Flick for the next few days.

Fencing Video

2005-11-26T14:52:00.000Z

Matt Dodwell epées me to pieces. I'm a bit new to the video technology here, but it seems to work better the second time you run it for some reason. Things to look out for when you do: Matt's level shoulders compared to my continually tipping ones; Matt's neat parries of my useless lunges compared to my wild flailing at his feints; Matt's expert touch on my foot to score the point compared to my accusing look at that foot after he has done so.

Fencing

2005-11-25T16:32:00.000Z

Fortunately the mask is very good at stopping you losing an eye.

I lunged. I parried. I feinted. I remised, reprised and reposted. And I lost. Heavily. Three times.

First up was the foil verses Jamie Kenber. They could make getting dressed for fencing an event in itself, but then I suppose it is rather important to do it right for safety’s sake. Suitably togged (and wired) up, I took my guard against the reigning British champion, with Ken, resplendent in blazer and tie, presiding.

“En garde!”… check… “Are you ready?”… are you joking?… “Fence!”…ok, here we g…oh… that’ll be one-nil then will it?

And repeat.

Fifteen times in a row.

The British Champion waits for me to make a false move before striking. He didn't have to wait long.

To say that Jamie Kenber is rather good at foil is like saying that George Best wasn’t bad at football. Fair enough, I suspect any of the rest of the foilists in the room could probably have beaten me 15-0 too, but at least half the times he hit me he did it so fast and so accurately that the sound of the buzzer genuinely surprised me because I hadn’t felt a thing.

Afterwards, as I dismantled my foil outfit and started trying to work out how to put on my sabre gear, while Jamie put on his jeans and started trying to work out what to do with the rest of his evening, he confessed that he wasn’t quite at his best at the moment as he’s carrying a bit of a back injury. All I can say is God help the rest of you foilists when it clears up.

After a quick breather, it was on to the sabre verses Michael Coombes. Having spent pretty much the whole of the first fight like a rabbit trapped in some particularly transfixing headlights, I was determined to get a bit more aggressive in this one. “Fence!” cried Ken. I bounded forward and got slashed on the head for my trouble – time for a rethink.

Michael Coombes's attacks were relentless. So was my failure to do anything about them.

Time and again Michael came at me and I failed utterly to parry his attacks. Time and again as we shuffled back to our marks I did that thing that batsmen and golfers do after a bad shot – I replayed the parry in the air as I would have liked to have done it a moment before and shook my head ruefully. This was a fairly good indicator of how far behind the game my brain was working – I was just about ready to parry the previous attack as the next one began.

Finally, I dug my heels in and remembered the odd fragment that people had worked so hard to teach me over the previous three weeks. I initiated an attack of my own. It was easily parried, and the reposte would have severed my jugular vein had I not been wearing the mask, but it got me thinking that just maybe I might get a point.

With my next attack, I did! As had been the case with most of the other clashes, I’ve really no idea what happened, but the buzzer buzzed and Ken pointed at me and announced that the score was now 10-1 in Michael’s favour. I carried on with my attacking strategy. It didn’t work. I lost 15-1.

By now, I was exhausted, despite having done in total (if you don’t count getting into and out of the gear) about 3 minutes exercise. The layers of protective clothing are very reassuring when someone is waggling a sword at you, but it ain’t half hot under it all.

I stripped down out of the sabre gear and set about dressing for epée. My opponent this time was Matt Dodwell, silver medallist in the British Youth Championships and 3rd ranked junior in the country at the moment. He’s also a good couple of inches taller than me and has a reach like Michael Phelps touching the wall.

Matt Dodwell advances with his big long arms, preparing to stab me in my big fat head.

As I was walking back to the piste Michael, my previous opponent, took me to one side and offered some last minute advice. It was kind of him, and I wish I could have repaid that kindness by remembering what he’d told me before I found myself 7-0 down again. Finally I did remember – “just stick your arm out as far as you can when he attacks and you might get a simultaneous hit” – and did as I had been told. My reward was my second (and last) hit of the night.

In truth, it slightly backfired as a tactic. Much like when Liverpool score early in the Champions League, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d only succeeded in making the opposition cross. With his next attack, he fleched. A fleche is essentially running at your opponent and hitting them on the way past. He later told me it was one of the best ones he’s ever done. The fact that I offered such pitiful resistance perhaps contributed to that.

As Matt reaches in hit me on the foot, I desperately try to parry to avoid him ripping my very attractive socks.

From there on, he pulled out all the stops, hitting me with absolute impunity on the foot, the head, the arm, the chest and the throat. I mostly didn’t have a clue what was going on (that’s true in general, but particularly so whilst fencing), but Ken informed me afterwards that I’d been done very artfully by a real expert.

And so the fencing came to an end. I have enjoyed it thoroughly. I can see why it’s not a more popular spectator sport – it’s too fast to follow unless you’re an expert and you know what to look for – but from behind the mask, it’s very exciting.

I spent most of last night feeling like I was letting down all the people who had given me so much of their time in recent weeks. I felt like everything I’d learnt went out the window the moment Jamie Kenber stabbed me in the chest before I’d even reacted to being told to fence. My teachers had stoked me up with numerous techniques for parrying and attacking, and I’d practiced them at home (La Vache is cut to shreds) until I felt reasonably comfortable doing all of them. In the fights though, it was fairly pointless knowing how to parry a certain attack when my eyes couldn’t move fast enough to see the other guy’s sword most of the time.

But then I got home and watched some of the video footage. Their teaching wasn’t entirely wasted. My feet were quite often in the right place, and occasionally I did manage a parry, not to mention the two glorious points I scored. I was glad to see that my body managed to reproduce some of what I’d learnt, despite my brain’s strongest urging to my legs to turn tail and run.

Ken pulled out all the sartorial stops in his role as president.

Huge thanks to the Oxford University Fencing Club – to Ken for his coaching, presidency and kind donation to Sobell House; to Jamie, Michael and Matt for spending time thrashing a novice; to Alex, Alec and particularly to Ellie for all their coaching and encouragement; and to all the rest of the members for putting up with a duffer taking up one of their pistes all night and for not laughing too much at his efforts.

Also, thanks as ever to the fan-base – to the other Johns, Kev and Tracey for taking the photos, shooting the video and making the sarcastic comments throughout. I’m nothing without you people.

Fencing Results

Foil
Lost to Jamie Kenber, 15-0

Sabre
Lost to Michael Coombes, 15-1

Epée
Lost to Matt Dodwell, 15-1

Fencing Preview

2005-11-22T23:38:00.000Z

“The three swords used in fencing competitions are the foil, the epée and the sabre.

The foil has a flexible rectangular blade with a blunt point. Touches may be made with the point on the trunk of the body between the collar and the hipbones.

The epée, the traditional sword of duels, has a rigid triangular blade with a point that is covered by a cone with barbed points. Touches may be made on any part of the body.

The sabre is a flexible triangular blade with a blunt point. Both the point and the cutting edges can be used to score touches, which must be made on the body, above the waist, including the head and arms.

In all events, a wire is attached to the fencer’s sword. This wire runs through the fencer’s outfit to a scoring box. When contact is made on the opponent’s body, a light flashes on and a buzzer sounds to record a hit.

Over the years Olympic fencing tournaments have used a variety of formats incorporating both round-robin pools and double-elimination rounds. The format currently in use is a single-elimination tournament, such as is used in boxing and tennis.

Each match is played to 15. If the score is tied after nine minutes, one minute of sudden-death overtime is contested. Before the final minute, the referee determines, through a coin flip or drawing of lots, which fencer will win should no touch be made in the additional minute.”

[with thanks once again to David Wallechinsky and his wonderful book, The Complete Book of the Olympics]

The history of fencing in the Olympics is rich and dramatic. For all my chuntering on recently about my chances of getting sliced, diced, chopped, skewered, stabbed, slashed, hacked or in any other way run through, I was mostly just trying to make it sound exciting for you and was fairly confident that all the protective gear one has to wear would do its job. Then I made the mistake of doing some light research.

In the games in Moscow in 1980, during the semi-final of the team foil competition, the Soviet world champion Vladimir Lapitsky was accidentally run through the chest when his opponent’s foil broke his leather protective clothing. The sword severed a blood vessel but missed his heart.

In 1982, two years after winning gold in the individual foil competition in Moscow, Soviet Volodymyr Smirnov was fencing West German Matthais Behr in the world championships (which Smirnov held at the time) in Rome. During the fight, Behr’s foil snapped, pierced Smirnov’s mask, penetrated his eyeball and entered his brain. The 28-year-old Smirnov died nine days later.

Almost as bad is the number of times some light-hearted, albeit competitive, swordplay sparked such bad feeling that the protagonists resorted to actual duels in order to settle their differences.

After a dispute in 1924, the Italian-born Hungarian fencing master Italo Santelli, who was 60 years old at the time and coaching the Hungarian foil team, was so insulted by the Italian team’s accusations that he lied to an official in order to get them thrown out of the competition that he challenged Adolfo Contronei, the Italian captain, to a real duel.

They acquired permission from the government to have at it, but before they could meet, Santelli’s 27-year-old son, Giorgio, invoked the code duello and demanded that he fight in his father’s place. They met on the Italian-Hungarian border and fought with heavy sabres. After two minutes, the younger Santelli caught the Italian captain with a blow to the head that left a deep slash. The duel was stopped at that point by doctors who were in attendance.

The same games inspired another duel between an Italian and a Hungarian. This time, the former, Oreste Puliti, was a fencer and the latter, Kovacs, a judge who accused the Italian’s opponents of throwing their fights. Puliti was outraged by the accusations and threatened to cane Kovacs, and was thus promptly disqualified.

Two days later, the pair bumped into each other in a music hall. The Hungarian judge listened to the ranting Italian and then haughtily told him he couldn’t understand a word he had said, as he didn’t speak Italian. Puliti punched him in the face and asked if he had understood that any better.

The men were pulled apart, but a formal duel was proposed. Four months later, this time on the Yugoslav-Hungarian border and accompanied by seconds, swords and spectators, they got stuck in again. After an hour of slashing away at each other, the spectators separated them having grown concerned about the severity of their collective wounds. Their honour restored, the two men shook what was left of their hands and made up.

In fact, looking through the history of the Olympic fencing events, the only possibly useful tip I picked up came from the 1928 Amsterdam games. Frenchman Lucien Gaudin became one of only two people ever to have won both the individual foil and epée gold medals. His countryman and opponent in the final of the epée, Georges Buchard, later claimed that Gaudin had begged and pleaded with him to allow Gaudin to win their match – so much so that Buchard agreed to do so.

As for my opponents for Thursday night, I’ve only really met one of them.

Matt Dodwell fights epée, is the current British junior number 3 and won the silver medal in the British Youths Championships this year. He is left-handed. While this will make him more difficult to fence, I have the consolation that it will apparently “look better in the photographs”. I watched him briefly last week as he fenced Alec (who later put me through my paces). I’d love to be able to say that I spotted a weakness that I intend to exploit – other than a curious leaning towards a pint of cider rather than stout in the pub afterwards, he seemed a perfectly balanced individual - but the truth is that I’m not even good enough at fencing to realise what makes other people good. That said, I suspect the fact that he’s comfortably taller than me and has fenced at various levels for his country might just give him an edge.

I also watched Michael Coombes fence sabre last week. Michael was 3rd in the Public Schools Senior Boys Sabre Championships this year. Even with Alex telling me exactly what was going on as each touch was scored or missed, all I was seeing was a frantic mêlée of arms, swords and feet that every so often would stop when the scoring box would buzz for no reason I could discern. It got me wondering if perhaps this is the reason fencing is not a more popular event at the Olympics - I was fairly avidly glued to the TV for the duration of the last games, but I’m not sure that I saw even an edited highlight – perhaps the technicality of it all requires a higher understanding or intimate knowledge of the sport on the viewer’s part than is generally the case in order to appreciate what’s going on.

There are rules of priority that are hard to bear in mind when your mind is already full of where your feet should be or how bent your elbow is. These rules essentially mean that on some occasions, while it may look like one fencer has scored a clear hit, it is in fact the other swordsman who gets the point. As a beginner, after a while, it can begin to feel a little like a sport someone is making up the rules of as you go along in order to make sure you don’t win.

The only thing I did notice about Michael’s style that may be helpful was that he likes to move forward – then again, perhaps the chap he was fighting simply likes to retreat – either way, I’m going to adopt a tactic of running at him as fast as I can to see if I can upset his natural game. This tactic might rank up there for stupidity alongside my long held game plan should I ever find myself playing snooker against Ronnie O’Sullivan to hit the balls all over the table and disrupt the patterns he’s used to playing within.

My foil opponent is Jamie Kenber. I’m almost sure I’ve seen someone at the fencing club with that name on his back at least once, but I can’t bring his style to mind. All I really know about him is that he is ranked ninth in the senior British rankings and is the current British foil champion. In the final he beat one Richard Kruse, who fought for Britain in the Athens games. I made the mistake of looking in the Team GB official Olympic report tonight to see how Mr Kruse had done. He got to the quarterfinals, which by my (perhaps skewed) reckoning makes him one of the best eight foilists in the world. He lost out to the man who eventually took the bronze medal.

His performance was the best by a British fencer with any weapon since 1964 when Henry Hoskyns, a 33-year-old fruit farmer from Somerset, finished seventh in the foil and won the silver medal in the epée. Kruse's achievements were all the more impressive given that he had only recently graduated from university and was fighting professional opponents with superior back-up and training facilities. And then he came home and Jamie beat him. And now I have to fight Jamie. So that should be easy.

Perhaps I’ll try some of that begging and pleading after all.

Strictly Come Fencing

2005-11-17T19:39:00.000Z

I have a confession to make. Anyone who knows me and has had the misfortune to find themselves on the dance floor when I take a notion to strut my stuff will be aware that I’m not a fan of conventional dancing. You can keep your regimented steps and synchronised movements; I’m usually the one in the middle annoying everyone with the randomness of my gangly gesticulations. This lack of fanaticism for all things Fred Astaire extends to watching other people indulging in such activity – Strictly Come Dancing? Strictly No Thank You.

And yet, perhaps worse than tuning in on a Saturday night to watch seasoned professional ballroom dancers guide gormless celebrities through a quickstep or a jive in an attempt to survive the dreaded public vote, I’ve caught myself several times this week not changing the channel when the nightly magazine programme that accompanies the weekly series appears on my television.

Strictly Come Dancing – It Takes Two (for that is what it is called) tracks the trials and tribulations of the clueless amateurs as the professionals try to teach them a new dance in preparation for the following week. Tonight, I caught myself watching it again and also noticed that I have been doing so rather more than someone with no interest in that sort of thing ought to – and certainly rather more than someone who has never watched the actual programme proper.

I’ll admit to having a slight soft-spot for the host, Claudia Winkleman, and that her penchant for a plunging neckline has done little to make me want to switch channels and watch ITN butcher the day’s news, but there’s something deeper going on. As I sit here writing with the show on in the background, I should instead be dancing up and down the living room wielding a sabre and attacking an ironing board. The reason I’m not practicing my fencing as I should be is that I’m enjoying watching other people going from a position of being all at sea to dancing a waltz as though they’ve been doing it for years.

Just now, I nodded with rueful recognition when Zoë Ball confessed to messing up her foxtrot because she forgot which foot she was supposed to start on. I felt Goughie’s pain when he grimaced with frustration at not being able to do the five things he’d been told to do all at the same time.

In an hour, I’m heading off for my last training session with the fencers before they slice and dice me in the three fights next week. Learning is repetition. If you’re the pupil, you do something wrong in a slightly different way over and over and over again until you get it right. Then you do it wrong again and swear a lot because, damn it, you had it mastered a minute ago!

If you’re the teacher, you tell the pupil the same thing in a slightly different way over and over and over again until something clicks and he gets it right. You commend him far too much for finally doing what you told him to do in the first place, and then you laugh at him when he messes it up again and gets cross.

I’ve said before, but will say again, that I greatly admire the patience being displayed by the people trying to teach me; it outlasts my own without fail and by a long, long way. The one thing I am learning better than anything else is that learning itself is much easier to do when you’re a child and repetition (as you will no doubt know if you have ever encountered a child who is asking for something) is just about your favourite thing in the world.

UPDATE:

Jamie Kenber (foil) is the current British Men's champion, beating British Olympian Richard Kruse in the final this year. He is currently ranked 9th in the senior rankings.

Matt Dodwell (epée) is current British Junior No.3 and was the silver medallist in the British Youth Championships this year. He is currently ranked 21st in the senior rankings.

Michael Coombes (sabre) was 3rd in the Public Schools Senior Boys Championships this year.

All three are members of the University of Oxford first team.

You can think of them as the three musketeers. I shall be thinking of them as the three guys who have very kindly offered to come along and chop me into little pieces next week.

Different Strokes

2005-11-08T17:28:00.000Z

What a different place he world of high jump would be had Dick Fosbury not thought of having a go at it backwards.

I’m a dreamer. I’m reliably informed by John Lennon that I’m not the only one, but still, that’s what I am. One recurring daydream that started shortly after I came upon the notion of doing all this involves discovering that far from being blunderingly inept at all things Olympic, there might just be an event that I’ve never tried before but turn out to be astoundingly good at.

In idle moments I imagine the Great Britain pole vault coach scratching his head and looking at a clipboard as I fall back to earth having cleared the bar by a foot. He is confused and exclaiming “But… that’s a British record. By half a metre. You’re in the team for Beijing.”

I confessed this dreaming habit just now to my colleague and friend Statue John while we smoked very un-Olympic cigarettes in the alleyway beside our office. He confessed in his turn that he has spent many idle hours thinking about “doing a Fosbury” – coming up with a revolutionary technique for performing one of the events that ensures victory despite a lack of what is commonly held to be the usual physical requirements of an Olympic champion.

At the 1968 games Fosbury revolutionized the sport of high jumping with just such a new technique, which became known as the Fosbury Flop. Instead of leaping facing the bar and swinging first one leg and then the other over the bar in a scissoring motion - the dominant method of the time - Fosbury turned just as he leapt, flinging his body backward over the bar with his back arched, following with his legs and landing on his shoulders.

The best John and I could come up with was some new swimming technique that would allow you to win the 50m Freestyle despite having a massive beer gut, baggy swimming trunks and (John insisted) a lengthy mullet unrestrained by anything so naff as a swimming cap.

Certain events heavily regulate techniques – for instance, I’m fairly sure that John’s suggested new long jump technique involving landing headfirst and rolling forwards (anyone who has seen the A-Team will know that such a technique can carry a man far enough to land a safe distance from and exploding jeep) would not only result in a concussion but also be against the rules of the event.

But others (like freestyle swimming and most of the track events) just involve covering a set distance as quickly as possible. Michael Johnson has a fair claim to being one of the greatest track athletes of all time, and he modelled his running style on that of an ostrich. His coaches told him it wouldn’t work, but he refused to listen (his training partners had to tell him he had gone a bit far when he started burying his head in the long jump pit mind you).

So rack your brain, loyal reader, and post a suggestion – be it pole-vaulting with a pole twice as long as the ones the experts use, or paying homage to Dick Fosbury by running the hundred metres backwards – all suggestions will be heard. And then roundly mocked, no doubt.

On Guard!

2005-11-04T15:13:00.000Z

In between fights, fencers like to get together and practice their high jump technique.

Fencing is one of only four sports to have been included in all of the modern Olympic games. It’s also one of those things that every man who never really grew out of being a little boy would really rather like to good at. Whether you fancied yourself as Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, Oliver Reid’s Athos, or (in my case) Guy Williams’ Zorro, sword fighting was something no young boy with access to a couple of sticks and a willing accomplice could resist.

Thanks (once again) to Kev Game and his remarkable ability to pull strings, I found myself last night in the Cricket Schools at the university sports centre, surrounded by sword-wielding experts dressed up like svelte bee-keepers. I was looking for Ellie, the kind soul who has offered to teach me the foil (one of the three fencing disciplines – the other two being epée and sabre).

Our plan, hatched by e-mail, had involved me coming along to a practice session and being put through my paces. It was a good plan, ruined only by my latest embarrassing injury. It was bad enough making it through forty arduous, high-speed kilometres of cycling in the triathlon without so much as a wobble only to come crashing to the ground a few weeks later cycling to the shops one Sunday evening, but this time, I may have outdone myself.

I’ve had a bit of a cough for a few days (I’m no doctor, but I suspect that walking home from a nightclub at five in the morning with my shirt open to the waist may have had something to do with it). The cough was just beginning to subside, but it was determined not to go without a fight. During one particularly violent outburst, I somehow managed to strain a muscle in my right side. It’s a tiny muscle – one I didn’t even know I had – but one that seems to be fairly heavily involved in just about every movement I try to make.

Fortunately for me (and my aching side), the first steps in learning to fence would seem to be just that – steps. Having found Ellie and marvelled at how much consideration she seems to have given my quest (“We’ll try to get you fighting left-handers if we can. It’s harder, but it will look much better in the photographs.”), I was introduced to Alex, a sabre specialist, who took me through some footwork.

One of the toughest things about this whole challenge is learning how to do new things. I don’t yet consider myself an old dog, but I do seem to struggle with the learning of new tricks. When I first started giving some serious thought to the challenges I would face in trying to have a go at all the Olympic events, I expected a lack of fitness to be by far the largest obstacle to my completion of most of them. Naively, it didn’t really occur to me that a lack of talent would also be a problem.

As I stumbled backwards and forwards trying to keep my distance from the young lady pointing a sword at my head and reminding me (very patiently) to keep my shoulders level, I suspect I looked more like a man caught up in his first barn dance than Errol Flynn toying with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

I am lucky to have once been good enough at a golf that the odd beginner occasionally asked me for advice. I would do my best to offer it patiently and politely (in the manner it had always been offered to me), but I was constantly fighting the urge to bellow, “Oh for God’s sake, just hit the bloody thing!” As such, I have unending admiration for everyone who has thus far offered me coaching (in any discipline) and managed to resist bellowing the same thing at me. Alex and Ellie are two more such people to add to the list.

Once Alex had finished teaching me how to dance up and down the piste, and even run me through (a poor choice of expression perhaps) how to go about striking my opponent with a sabre, she passed me back to Ellie who introduced me to the foil.

As it turns out, there are five different guards one could adopt when fighting sabre, but Alex must have realised fairly quickly what level she was pitching at and just taught me the easiest one. Ellie had no intention of letting me off so lightly with the foil and was quickly talking me through the nuances of sixte, quarte, septime and octave. Luckily, she also sent me home with a book full of pictures to jog my memory.

If the helmet masked my puzzled expression, I suspect my teacher quickly revised the detail of her teaching plan when we started talking about instincts. Having told me that essentially every movement in fencing is “instinct refined and honed”, she tried to demonstrate her point my slowly lunging towards my left side.

“What would your instinct tell you to do there?” she asked.

“Well – to move my sword across my body and deflect your sword.”

“Very good! Then what?”

“Then I’d probably reach over and punch you in the face with my other hand and wait for a fellow musketeer to break a chair over your back.”

Despite my cavalier attitude, we hatched a new plan, the broad (if optimistic) aim of which is to get me through all three fencing disciplines before the student body disappears at the end of Michaelmas Term (so the beginning of December). They have their work cut out, but they sent me home with a helmet and a sabre so that I could get some practice in at home as my side improves. As such, I take great pleasure in introducing you to my new practice partner. I think I’ll call him ‘La Vache’.

He may not look up to much, but the horns really freak me out.

In the eyes of the law, a sabre is considered a deadly weapon, and therefore not for carrying on the bus. Amazingly though, everyone was in agreement that the act of shoving half the blade into my umbrella was enough to render it legal and I set off for home with a helmet under my arm and a Bank of Scotland umbrella-sword at my side. I’m not so grown up that I won’t confess a certain feeling of satisfaction at paying my bus fare with a ten-pound note despite having change in my pocket. For once, the driver didn’t ask me if I had anything smaller.

Swedish Flatpack Inspiration

2005-10-18T21:29:00.000+01:00

You may have noticed, avid reader, that inspiration and motivation wax and wane rather a lot around here. When I first set about this challenge, I envisaged many hurdles that I would have to literally and metaphorically clear, but I naively didn’t anticipate motivation to be one of them – or at least not as big a one as it’s turning out to be.

Of all the things that could motivate me – the suffering, bravery and determination of the beneficiaries of the charity money I’m raising compared to my own, the enormity of the task itself, the fact that I love sport – it’s funny that it took a recent trip to IKEA to kick-start my desire to train again.

My housemates, Jamie and Kate, are soon moving into their brand new home. They needed to go to IKEA with a van to get a couple of beds. I needed a new bed for the spare room. IKEA in Brent Cross is open until midnight. What else would we have done with our Friday night?

Meatballs and bed shopping out of the way, all that was left was to collect our purchases from the collection depot, load them into the van and head back up the M40 to Oxford. As we shut the doors of the van on our new purchases, it was just shy of midnight. By the look of some of the faces still milling about the collection depot awaiting their furniture, we had gotten off lightly.

As we manoeuvred about the car park trying to find the way out, we were approached by a couple of damsels in distress. Somehow, they had ascertained that we were from Oxford (I’m not sure if it was the “Oxford Vehicle Rentals” or the five-foot cartoon ox plastered all over the side of the van that gave it away).

“We’ve bought a wardrobe!” said damsel one.

“It doesn’t fit in our car!” said damsel two.

“Not a problem!” said the heroes, probably breaking some sort of white-van-man code of ethics in the process.

Before heading to IKEA that night, I had met Kev from Sobell House who had very kindly come into town to give me some new Ultimate Olympian cards for handing out to baffled newcomers to the cause. They have my mobile number on them, so I gave one to the damsels in case I wasn’t able to keep up with them on the trip back to their house.

By the time we reached the wardrobe’s new home, they had read the card and were most enthusiastic. Damsel one insisted upon giving us something for our trouble. I protested that we’d been coming back anyway. We settled on a donation for Sobell House instead.

As we drove home with our beds, I was filled with the warm glow of raising money for this cause I consider to be so worthwhile. I had been inspired to get my finger out and organise some more events in a way that Tim’s nagging could never have managed (don’t ever stop, Tim!). Perhaps most importantly, I was inspired to stop living this post-triathlon playboy lifestyle and get back into training.

I’ll admit that inspiration comes in waves and confess that I spent the next day at the Oval drinking and watching Australians fighting (and incidentally playing some sort of variant of rugby in the background), and then sat up until four playing poker and drinking some more. But in the course of the following week, I rode a few of those little waves of inspiration to the gym and the pool.

For now, I’m going to post this and then go downstairs and get Jamie to fill out an entry form for next April’s London Marathon while I do the same. If the fear doing that will instil doesn’t inspire me still further, I’ll begin to get slightly worried about my prospects of ever finishing this challenge.

Missing In-action

2005-10-12T22:46:00.000+01:00

“It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.”

O. Douglas – Penny Plain (1920)

And so it is that I’m sitting here in my study staring at the screen and wondering what to tell you. I have excuses for my absence, as always, but mostly you’ve heard them before, if not from me then from some other wannabe athlete with too great a liking of strong drink.

Sobell House are trying to get thirty people together to run next year’s (London) marathon. You have to enter before 21st October using a form in one of the official magazines. If you get in and want to run for Sobell House with me and several other suckers who have already said they’ll do it, e-mail me and I’ll get your name on the list.

Inspired once more by panic and a large dose of fear, I have been training twice already this week. Hopefully, over the coming days, I will also get back into the habit of boring you all silly with my nonsense.

Crash Bang Wallop!

2005-08-30T15:45:00.000+01:00

This is what a real bike crash looks like. Mine was slightly less impressive.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I had hoped that when it did happen it would be spectacular, that I’d be in my full cycling gear, preferably in a race, and preferably surrounded by terribly concerned (and attractive) female spectators. I am disappointed to report therefore that my first major cycling crash since I was seven years old came at about nine o’clock on Sunday night as I nipped up to the shops in my jeans and a t-shirt.

I lifted my helmet off its peg on my way out, and then lobbed it back into the house using the same logic as the idiotic motorist who doesn’t bother with a seatbelt on short journeys, as though accidents can only happen after a certain distance has been covered. I didn’t bother with my gloves either. It had never really occurred to me until I was sliding along the road on my palms that the thickly padded gloves might serve a purpose other than preventing my hands getting sore from too long clutching the handlebars.

I wasn’t completely reckless in my approach. I did have my lights on, even if the only good they did was to stop the passing cars running over my bike as it lay in the middle of the road and I lay against a fence wondering why no one was stopping to see if I was all right.

As for spectacular, the crash itself couldn’t have been much more mundane. There is a right turn at the top of my road. To avoid having to step out of my toe-clips while waiting for a gap in the traffic, I tend to edge onto the footpath shortly before it and negotiate it slowly with the pedestrians. On Sunday night, as I came up to the point I usually cross the road, a car overtook me, so I had to wait for the next break in the kerb. At least, it looked like a break in the kerb.

I could hear another car coming up behind me, so I stood up on the pedals and put on a burst of speed to be able to cross to the footpath safely. I was probably doing about 30 km/h when I hit what turned out to be an ever so slightly raised kerb (no more than two inches, if that). Just as I hit it, I was standing hard on the right pedal. The bike skewed out to the left underneath me and my leg pushed on through and met no resistance.

Still with the bike between my legs, I hit the ground with my right knee and right shoulder. As I bounced and got my hands out in front of me, the bike hit the kerb again and bounced out into the road. I looked up and saw a fence I was clearly going to end up hitting. I tried to lift my right hand to fend it off, with the result that when I finally came to rest, my right arm was wrapped up behind my back and wedged into the fence by my shoulder. My helmet-less head stopped just in time.

I lay there watching the cars pass for a moment replaying in my head the strange noise I had made when I came off. It wasn’t a terrified screech or an agonised howl, it was the sort of noise you make when you hear about someone doing what I’d just done – a slight “tut” followed by a cringe and a sort of empathising “oooooooh” that implies “That’s going to hurt in the morning.”

I wasn’t worried that I’d done anything serious until I tried to move my right arm. It was when it wouldn’t move and I realised it was a lot further behind me than it had ever let on it was capable of going that I began to worry that my golf trip to France on Thursday might have been in jeopardy (always good to keep a sound sense of your priorities in a crisis I find). I sometimes sleep on my right arm and wake up in the night unable to feel it. The feeling as I lay there was exactly the same.

I rolled backwards to free it up, but it still didn’t move. I took hold of my right sleeve with my left hand and yanked my arm around to have a look at it. As I did, there was a delicate popping noise in my right shoulder and suddenly I had my right arm back and working again. I wondered if maybe I had dislocated it, but dismissed that as ridiculous. I wasn’t in any pain, and I’ve seen people on rugby pitches having shoulders returned to where they’re meant to be – if the pain is enough to make those hard nuts wince, it would surely have made me pass out.

I felt around under my shirt, half expecting to find something out of place, but in the end there was nothing that felt any weirder than usual. Shoulder and arm taken care of, I turned my attention to my knee. I bent it in and out from a sitting position a couple of times and it moved freely. I risked standing up, noting my grazed hands as I did so, and it supported my weight without complaint. It was bleeding, but I didn’t seem to have done any structural damage.

What I did next must have been a curious sight for the passing motorists (at least ten cars went past while I lay on the ground, not one of them even slowed down any more than necessary to avoid crushing my bike). Someone passing after I stood up would have seen a lanky man in torn and bloodied jeans and a t-shirt practicing his golf swing by the side of the road as his bike (with a slightly wonky front wheel) sat in the road. It was only when one such lucky passer-by honked his horn that I realised I should move the bike.

There’s lots of good news. My golf swing feels no worse than usual, so I’m still going to France. Ice packs on the shoulder very effectively reduced the swelling and eased the pain that arrived shortly after I got back to the house. On my way to work this morning (walking this time) I noticed that the wooden fence I hit is only about ten yards long and that either side of it is nothing but concrete wall.

It could have been a lot worse in a lot of ways, but thankfully it wasn’t. I got away with being a bit stupid and a bit uncoordinated. Next time, I’ll wear my helmet. And clean pants, just in case.

Show Me The Money!

2005-08-26T16:11:00.000+01:00

After much fiddling about, I now have a Just Giving page through which you can all donate your hard-earned cash to Sobell House.

For the moment, I have slipped into a post-triathlon celebratory alcoholic binge. I’m going to France to play some golf next weekend, the end of that trip will hopefully signal a return to training as I’m hoping to run next year’s London marathon. The day I return from my holiday (5th September), Martin Keown is hopefully going to be launching the Sobell Raffle at the St Giles Fair in Oxford. If I can’t make it back from the airport in time to do it myself, Kev Game from Sobell House has promised to schmooze on my behalf with regard to the Olympic football match.

This coming (Bank Holiday) Monday signals the end of the first year of this challenge. Of 136 events, I will have completed just eleven. I should probably be slightly downhearted about that, but in all honesty I’m anything but. Several of the more taxing ones are out of the way (the 20km and 50km walks and the triathlon stand out) and the plans for a lot of the others are snowballing pretty much as I hoped they would.

Next summer, I hope to rent the Iffley Road track (scene of Sir Roger Bannister’s running of the first ever sub-four-minute mile) for a couple of weekends and stage a pair of Ultimate Olympian athletics meets. These will be open to all comers for a small fee (£5 an event probably) and I will do my best to entice some proper athletes along to help us gauge just how rubbish we are.

I plan to organise a couple of swimming galas along similar lines, and with any luck include the diving events on the same days so that all entrants get the added bonus of a good laugh at my expense.

Lots of you have been beavering away on my behalf with your contacts in various sports, and for that I thank you most sincerely – from former Olympic fencers to experts in shooting and rowing, the offers of help have been flowing in thick and fast.

If you’ve got an idea for an event, e-mail me. If you’ve got a friend who knows someone who has his or her hair cut by the mother of a former Olympian, e-mail me. If you want to wish me luck or hurl abuse at me, e-mail me. Thank you all for your help so far and for keeping me from abandoning my pursuit of the ridiculous.

More Triathlon Photos

2005-08-16T16:57:00.000+01:00

Sorry to keep banging on about it, but I thought you might want to see what the pros from actionphoto.net managed to produce on race day. If you want a copy of any of them, let me know and I'll deride you in public whilst laughing a lot.

Never has one man been so pleased to get out of a wetsuit.

I spotted the man with the camera slightly too late to stop pulling a face.

I wasn't smiling the whole way round, see?

The lady with the camera said "Smile!" - this was the best I could manage.

Kev Game from Sobell House - 3 hours, five minutes, thirteen seconds. Git.

Patron Patten

2005-08-16T16:22:00.000+01:00

"I went to the doctor, I said 'It hurts when I do that...'".

Thanks to Kev Game from Sobell House, my latest co-conspirator, the Ultimate Olympian now has its first official patron. Lord Patten of Barnes is the Chancellor for the Universities of Newcastle and Oxford and has offered his support to the cause. He’s a very busy man, so I don’t expect he’ll be putting himself up for the anchor leg in the 4 X 100m relay team or anything, but hopefully with his help I can scrounge some help from some of the university sports clubs.

His wikipedia entry is very amusing, not least because the fact that he was once Minister for Overseas Development reminded me of one of my favourite Monty Python sketches. I’ve never met him, but he’s clearly a nice man. Hong Kongers gave him an affectionate nickname (the first and last governor to be afforded this honour) based on his rotund figure and an alleged predeliction for egg tarts.

So, “Fat Patten”, we salute you and thank you for your support.

Stats, Glorious Stats!

2005-08-16T11:49:00.000+01:00

If you click on the picture above, you can see a bigger version of it which you should be able to actually read (thanks for the techie help, Mishy). I've posted it not as some triumphant announcement of my own times and position, but by way of a slautation to one ade fajemisin. He was the last person to finish, and he did so more than four and three-quarter hours after he started.

After swimming around the dock for nearly an hour, he then cycled around London for more than two and a half. Then, despite all that, he ran the 10 K in about the same time as me. I don't know if he did it for a charity, or to prove a point, or just because it was a nice day and he had nothing else planned. Any which way, I admire him greatly - he's what this website is all about - doing exceptional things very badly.

[I am also slightly disappointed that I was beaten into 666th place by a man called Daniel Slowly - talk about adding insult to injury]

The London Triathlon 2005

2005-08-12T18:55:00.000+01:00

Craig Doyle tries to get his head around the notion of doing 136 Olympic events.

Despite my woeful attempts at navigation (sorry, Caitlin) we made it to the ExCel centre in London’s docklands in time for an interview with the BBC on Saturday. Having established that we had mutual friends in Ireland (it’s a game Irish people and Kiwis play while abroad), Craig Doyle got on with interviewing me, Sascha and Timo about the notion of doing all the Olympic events in general and the possibility of finishing the triathlon in particular. It was great to have Sascha there – he’s an old hand at dealing with these media types – and I was particularly inspired when he told Doyle that I’d been training hard and would finish the race without a problem. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t.

As we stood by the water bedecked in our new Ultimate Olympian T-shirts (brilliantly scrounged from a supplier by Timo) and the camera shifted to Sascha, I had a look up the full length of the swim course for the first time. 1500 metres is a long way when you swim it as 60 lengths of a 25-metre pool, but somehow it looked longer all stretched out to two big lengths of 750 metres.

Another wave of sprint racers set off while I was watching – six hundred wetsuit-clad arms leapt like salmon out of the frothing madness as they battled for space and position. You need to be slightly unhinged to try and do a triathlon, but you need to be a special kind of nutter to want to win one.

Interview done, it was off to rack the bike and pick up my timing chip. In the end, I took Tim up on his kind offer and used his bike instead of the Pale Rider – but more on that decision later. As I waited for someone to arrive at the desk containing my chip, James Cracknell was having a discussion with the jobsworth at the desk next to me.

JC: “I’m really sorry, I don’t have any photo ID with me.”

JW: “Well, I’m sorry Mr Cracknell, but without ID I can’t give you the chip.”

JC: “Yeah but…” (He was trying so hard not to use the expression “Don’t you know who I am?”)

UO: “I’ll vouch for him.” I offered, “Don’t you recognise him?”

JW: “I know who he is, mate, but I can’t give him a chip without ID.” (He was trying so hard not to use the expression “It would be more than my job’s worth.”)

As the double Olympic gold medallist tried to phone his wife for help, his phone battery died. I offered him mine, but he pointed out that unless it had his wife’s number on it, it wasn’t much use to him. I didn’t confirm that I didn’t have his wife’s number (I let him wonder), just wished him luck and shuffled off to rack the bike – my first event with a field containing a real Olympian and I’d clearly gained an early psychological advantage that he’d find hard to shrug off.

After a wander around the expo, it was off to the hotel to check in before heading to Canary Wharf for some excellent cabo-loading (thanks, Caitlin). I climbed into bed at about eleven, convinced I wouldn’t sleep, but as I lay there, sporting my London Triathlon wristband like some escaped hospital patient, a strange calm descended. It’s hard to know where it came from, but I’m sure the Steve Martin film on ITV also helped me nod off.

On Sunday morning, I still felt pretty calm. I ate breakfast, drank my isotonic drinks and generally went through the motions of getting ready without a sign of a butterfly in my stomach. And then I started watching England trying to close out a victory in the second test. By the time we had to leave the hotel, Australia only needed 70 more runs to win. I was no longer calm.

Unfortunately, I missed Timo’s wave starting as I stood in a queue to get into the transition area with the rest of my gear. I got a phone call a few minutes later from his (gold medal winning, world record holding) brother wishing me luck. I was calm again. Sascha had told the BBC I’d been training hard and would finish without a problem; it must have been true.

Ritchie Barber (another gold medal winner) had come down with Sascha from Manchester to watch Timo compete. He’d brought with him a very handy bit of advice for people in a hurry to get into their wetsuits – a plastic bag popped over the foot (or hand) gets that bad boy on there in double quick time.

Thanks to Ritchie's tip, it only took me 30 seconds to get it on this time.

With minutes to go before the start, I studiously listened to my iPod (Evil by Interpol) and ignored what was going on around me as best I could. It worked quite well. Mere seconds from getting into the water, I felt something verging on euphoria – all those weeks of training (or, more often, feeling bad for drinking, smoking and not training) were coming to an end. In a few short hours, I’d be able to relax again.

Trying to perfect your Roger Moore eyebrow raise? Get a swimming cap!.

Those hours turned out to be anything but short.

I was one of the last in our wave of around three hundred to climb down the steps onto the pontoon. I watched with a rapidly disappearing calm as people jumped manfully into the murky, brown water and boldly struck out for the start line. Finally I spotted a couple of people on my wavelength. They were sitting at the end of the floating platform looking into the water. “Whose stupid idea was this then?” I asked as I sat down next to them. One of them looked at me and it was clear that he might be sick through his terrified grimace if he tried to speak. The other one was able to talk all right, but only to himself.

I looked down into the water. I couldn’t see my feet.

In the end, it was the temperature that drove me in. A wetsuit isn’t for sitting around in on a hot afternoon. I slithered into the water and began swimming towards the start line. Well… I say swimming; really I was doing that odd breaststroke that your mum used to do when she’d just had her hair done but you’d nagged her into taking you swimming anyway. After twenty metres of that, I thought I’d chance a head-under-the-water stroke. It took me three attempts before I actually built up the bottle to do it properly, and as soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t.

It was like being plunged immediately into nothingness; the cap muffling out the sounds, the water swallowing what little I could see of my hand as I pulled through the stroke, the ghostly apparition of bubbles appearing from the depths (these were, of course, coming from my wetsuit sleeve, but you’d be amazed how quickly I convinced myself that there was something down there). I gasped. Gasping isn’t generally a useful reaction to anything, but this is especially true if your head is underwater when you do it.

I bolted upright, coughing and spluttering, all the while thinking about the latest surprise my body had encountered – as well as being impossibly deep, impossibly dark and surprisingly cold, the water was salty.

Fortunately, the man with the megaphone at the start was counting down from thirty and I had almost no more time to work myself into a panic. The wetsuit provides enough buoyancy that just sitting there your head stays above the water. I decided that was the position I should adopt to watch the start. The hooter was hooted and the race began. Absurdly, I had Murray Walker’s voice in my head screaming “And it’s go, go, go…” as I continued to sit, sit, sit. It was a ridiculous eruption of white water from hundreds of flailing limbs as the nutters battled for position.

"And they'e off! Apart from the guy at the back, who appears to just be sitting there, Terry."

I found myself laughing – not hysterically, I found it genuinely funny. It only took ten seconds for an area of clear water to open up in front of me. I swam into it at a leisurely breaststroke - the underwater visions experienced when you’re looking forwards are less harrowing.

Fifty metres out from the start, I encountered a screamer. A man with very professional looking goggles was bobbing up and down and literally screaming. I stopped and asked him if he was all right. His response was as English as one could imagine. He stopped screaming instantly and quite clearly pronounced, “Oh yes, don’t worry, I’m just panicking. Carry on” before starting to scream again. I think one of the safety kayaks fished him out shortly after that.

Although the field was now comfortably 100 metres ahead, I wasn’t alone. A few stragglers were around me adopting various tactics. One guy was doing what looked like a very nice crawl, but I was catching him up with my very improvised breaststroke. Another chap was also doing the crawl, but it was like he had one massively overdeveloped hand – he would put his head down and hammer out a few strokes, only to stop, lift his head and realise he had veered violently off to the right. I expect that by the time he made it back to the transition (if he ever did) he had swum about three times as far as anyone else.

Two hundred metres in, I hit my first really low patch. My stroke was awkward, my back was already hurting, the cold water was giving me an ice-cream-headache and the halfway mark didn’t seem to be any closer than it had been five minutes before. I stopped again and bobbed around. A kayak pilot asked me if I needed help. I would have made a joke about psychiatry, but I was too busy trying not to say “Yes, get me out of here.” I started swimming again.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the next few strokes I realised I had found a good rhythm. Suddenly, I wasn’t in the least bit bothered by anything. I noticed without being happy or sad about it that I had passed the quarter distance point. I just kept breathing and swimming. Before I noticed anything else, I was asking the safety guard at the halfway mark if he knew the way to the ExCel centre. He had the decency to laugh.

The second half of the swim was much better. I started to reel in a couple of stragglers. I got so excited by the prospect of catching and overtaking someone that I risked a bit of crawl. That went well for about eight strokes until I hit a large rope in the water and stopped dead. There was a kayak paddling furiously towards me and the furious paddler was bellowing, “Get back in the course!” It would seem I’d suffered a similar directional hiccup to the guy with the big hand and swum at virtually ninety degrees to where I’d been aiming. I gave up chasing the people in front.

I hit another low about 300 metres from the end of the swim. I’d been able to see the bright blue pontoon quite clearly for ages, but it wasn’t getting any closer. The thought that I’d soon be able to quench the thirst that was building rapidly kept me going. I started to get excited about having a go on Tim’s bike. My concentration drifted off again and suddenly I was being ushered around a huge inflatable of a bottle of the sponsor’s product and pointed at the lifeguards waiting to fish me out at the finish.

[Brian Blessed] "Gordon's alive!?" [/Brian Blessed].

As I climbed out and pulled my hat and goggles off, I wanted to scream with delight. I hadn’t drowned. I shakily climbed up the steps towards the transition. A small crowd gave me a big cheer. It was great. Everyone loves the struggling idiot at the back, and I’ll be honest, I quite enjoyed being that idiot. I stopped to wave at Tim and Caitlin. I spotted Craig Doyle doing an interview with Tim Don and bellowed at him “I thought you were doing the race! Where’s your wetsuit?” He had the good grace to laugh and bellow back “Focus!” while Tim Don just got grumpy about the fact that I’d interrupted their interview.

Tim Don, world number two, laughs at my efforts to get out of the wetsuit.

A very pretty lady started telling me to get my wetsuit off. I grinned at her and did as she told me to, all the time telling her “I didn’t die!” I think I was slightly delirious. I half- walked, half-trotted into the transition hall, found my bike, had a drink, got my gear on for the cycle and headed out. From the times I’ve looked at, an average transition from swim to cycle for an amateur duffer is around two minutes, tops. I took more than eight, but I couldn’t have cared less.

I was moving so fast, I started warping the zebra crossings.

The cycle itself was hard. It was a procession of bottoms whizzing past me at speeds I couldn’t comprehend while I wrestled with the gears on Tim’s bike that I hadn’t been sensible enough to work out how to use properly before the race. It was one long slog from beginning to end, only improved occasionally by being overtaken by a good-looking lady’s bottom or by passing a little pocket of enthusiastic spectators (everyone loves the stragglers).

Wet bottom + 96 minutes in the saddle = ouch

The most depressing bit was looking at the odometer and seeing I only had a kilometre left to go. This was depressing because when I looked up the road it was clear I had at least three more to do. Perhaps the course was longer in the slow lane. By the time I did wobble back into transition, I was glad to get off the bike. Despite the wonderful design of triathlon shorts, wet bums and bikes aren’t made for each other.

If my legs were slightly wobbly after the swim, they now felt roughly the consistency of Angel Delight as I trotted my bike back to its rack and rummaged around for my energy bar. I had run out of drink during the second lap of the cycle and was starting to feel a bit parched. I kept thinking about the advice to be found on the side of most fluid replacement sports drinks “By the time you feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated!”

Sunglasses inside - one of my favourite looks.

I set off on the run at a blistering pace. At last I was doing some overtaking of my own. In the first hundred metres alone I overtook three officials sitting in chairs, and a table (although the last one might have been bolted to the floor to be fair). In truth, my running action was what Peter Kaye describes as “That running your dad does, where everything is moving around, but he could get there quicker by just walking.”

I got a cheer from my entourage (swollen by the arrival during the cycle of my housemate, Kate) as I exited the transition phase and hit the run course. The first kilometre was the worst. I did quite a lot of straight-off-the-bike-and-out-for-a-run training, so I had some idea of how my legs would feel, but they were worse than I’d hoped they would be. They ached from toe to (still damp) bum as I waddled past the cheering crowds. There’s nothing like looking pathetic to get you a (sometimes ironic) cheer from a bunch of complete strangers.

As I slogged around the cycle, James Cracknell was finished (he was 4th in our age group) and on his way home. Git.

I stopped for some water at a water stop (my first attempt at drinking while running having resulted in a mild choking fit) and probably drank too much at once. I burped my way through the next two kilometres around the dock before noticing a little speedboat with a camera team in it filming someone who was obviously coming up behind me. I had a look over my shoulder and saw… Craig bloody Doyle.

He threw a sweaty arm around my shoulder and dragged me along for a bit, chatting away. I hope he wasn’t wearing a microphone because I believe I may have sworn more than once when I finally managed to ask him how on earth he had caught me up. I knew I hadn’t been fast, but I was out of my wetsuit before he even put one on. He just laughed and told me I was doing really well and to keep going before powering off after the speedboat.

I discovered the next day that he was only doing the run stage of a BBC Celebrity team relay, but as he waved again passing me in the other direction I couldn’t have been more demoralised.

The run was physically the easiest bit to be honest, after the pain of the first kilometre wore off. The crowds and the prospect of actually making it to the end made the mental challenge easier too. That said, I was still dreading returning to the finish line to start my second lap. I had built that up in my mind as being the most likely moment for me to just give up – it seemed cruel and unusual to make us run right past the finish and do it all again.

In the end though, that moment was maybe my favourite of the whole race. I bobbled up the slope outside, feeling the hill bringing back the pain in my legs. I reached the top and turned into the building to be greeted by Timo and Sascha yelling at me like no man has ever been yelled at. I could feel a massive grin spread all over my face as I deviated off the racing line to congratulate Timo for finishing and wallow in the encouragement. It was three more kilometres before I remembered my legs hurt and by then, I was only two more from the end and starting to get demob happy.

The muscle wastage over the course of the race was astounding - when I started, I looked like Arnie.

I finished in just over three and a half hours. Almost a week later, I’m still slightly choked when I really think about the fact that I finished it. To be honest, despite everything I’ve been telling you all for the last few months, I was almost convinced for most of my training that this one was going to go down as a valiant failure – just too hard for mortals with weaknesses.

I finished in a mere 16 hours, 40 minutes and 39 seconds.

The BBC’s coverage of the event will be shown on Grandstand tomorrow (Saturday) from about 2:45PM I think. I don’t know whether or not they’ll use the interview they did with us, but even if they don’t I’m looking forward to seeing the programme.

Huge thanks to all of you for your support (and money!), but special mentions for Tim, Caitlin, Kate, Timo, Sascha and Ritchie – without you lot, I’d have been fished out of the dock screaming most likely.

My first medal!

I didn't die!!!

2005-08-08T10:27:00.000+01:00

But it was close run thing. My times we as follows:

Swim - 00:41:25
Bike - 01:36:39
Run - 01:01:37

Total - 03:30:24
Place - 666

I'll write more and put up the rest of the pictures when I get a chance. In the meantime, if I ever express any interest in doing another one, have me restrained.

And then I go and spoil it all...

2005-08-01T15:48:00.000+01:00

... by saying something stupid like, “Yeah, I’ll have another beer if there’s one going.”

I’ve always had a self-destructive streak, but being aware of it and preventing it from having an impact on my life are two very different things. Through the course of my triathlon training I’ve had good weeks and bad weeks. The good weeks have involved eating nourishing food, drinking only water or isotonic recovery drinks, sleeping for a full eight hours each night and (most importantly) six days of training and a day off. The bad weeks have involved the odd late night (occasionally fuelled by alcohol), the odd missed training session (or five), and even, more recently, the odd cigarette or cigar (see alcohol excuse above).

With one week to go until the event itself, last week constituted my last chance to do some hard training before beginning to ‘taper off’ my schedule. The problems started on Wednesday. The cricket match I was supposed to be playing in was rained off. I thought I’d stick my head round the door of the club on my way home anyway, just in case anyone had dropped in. Several jugs of Carlsberg and three cigarettes later, I staggered to the bus stop on the High Street with nothing more profound floating around my addled mind than “ooops!”

Somehow, I woke up on Thursday feeling physically fine (if somewhat guilt-ridden). I bounded through my working day without so much as a yawn, and when I got home, I jumped straight on my bike and headed for the pool. I got into the water intending to do 30 lengths, but when I reached that target in less than 15 minutes I figured I’d push on and do a full 1,500 metres (60 lengths). I finished in around half an hour, climbed out, towelled off a little and jumped straight on my bike again. Despite the beginnings of a slight weariness in my legs, I did the 4-kilometre cycle home (up a reasonably testing hill) about as well as I ever have.

I went to bed on Thursday night feeling like I’d cleared my conscience. I slept well. I woke up on Friday feeling like someone had driven a steamroller over my head. I was so tired I felt sick. Drinking hadn’t affected me much, but exercise had given me the mother of all hangovers.

Much discouraged (and utterly exhausted), I decided against a light run on Friday night, and instead went to the pub with Jamie and Gareth. I didn’t overdo it – just three pints of Guinness (and a cigar so small it barely warrants a mention) – and woke up on Saturday feeling much improved. So much improved in fact that I decided not to train.

On Saturday evening, I headed up to John’s to help him celebrate his birthday. I didn’t intend to drink, but had one beer just to be sociable. I very clearly told the Doctor not to let me have another. After the third one, I had to switch to rum to stop him giving me a hard time. The cigarettes John reluctantly gave me, I smoked purely to stop him feeling like some sort of social leper at his own birthday party.

Sunday was spent in bed, on the sofa and on the golf course. It ended very pleasantly with a couple of beers and a Dominoes pizza. Training would only have spoilt it.

I would feel guilty anyway, but due to the news of Tim’s forced withdrawal from the triathlon, I feel even worse. Despite (or possibly because of) the hours of training he has put in over the last few months, not to mention the money he has spent on gear, his neurologist has diagnosed his persistent tingly numbness as myelitis and forbidden him to race. He’s putting a brave face on it, but I can tell he’s gutted.

All round good egg (and masochist) that he is, Tim’s still going to come along this weekend and has even offered to let me use his bike. I’ll give it a road test on Friday night to see how I like it. I’ve grown emotionally attached to the Pale Rider over these last few months – she has done very well in training – but I will have very few qualms about dropping her for the new girl if it’s likely to save me even a few kilojoules of energy in getting around the 40km course on Sunday.

Despite my confessions of digressions, preparing for this event has become somewhat all-consuming. It is the default position of my mind at the moment to seize any idle moment and return to absently worrying about how it will all pan out. I find myself (sometimes at the oddest moments, but usually between beers) obsessing about what I’ll do if my goggles come off in the swim and I lose a contact lens, or how I’ll go about changing a bike tyre if I get a puncture. Even when I’m not training (so most of the time), I’m thinking about it.

As such, while it no doubt sent my mother up the wall, it was a welcome relief for me yesterday when I heard that my sister had gone into labour. Finally I had something else to worry and think about. Then she went and spoilt all that by giving birth to Emma at 11:51 last night. Mother and baby are both doing well, so I’m back to worrying about exploding inner tubes (mostly on bikes) and swallowing too much of the Thames.

I Love the Smell of Neoprene in the Morning...

2005-07-20T23:18:00.000+01:00

The veins in my hands bulge as my heart works overtime trying to get the blood around my body.

There's a bit of a standing joke in our office. Many of the people there are my friends as well as my colleagues, so occasionally, when we're out and we meet strangers, the dreaded question "How do you all know each other?" comes up. What follows is the briefest possible description of our work (anything more elaborate would render the listener unconscious within seconds), followed by the additional snippet that our company is split into sectors - Gareth works in sugar, Simon deals with starch, Rob's in charge of coffee and (here comes the funny bit) John's in rubber!

You can almost feel the extra buoyancy even without getting wet.

Well, tonight, for the first time, I finally was. I can't say I enjoyed it much, to be frank. At first I was convinced they'd sent me the wrong size, but later (long after I'd taken the suit off) I read the instructions for putting it on and discovered I might not have done it quite correctly. Even so, I'm fairly sure the rapid loss of blood flow to, well, everywhere will at best only be slightly reduced by putting the thing on as per the instructions.

Given my recent weight gain, I'm surprised the table didn't collapse.

If the photographs look like they were taken in a hurry, that's because they were - if we'd hung around any longer, I may have passed out. And I'm only slightly joking.

I apologise for the recent lack of entries. I have a post in mind about just how much time this training for the triathlon is taking up, but ironically, I haven't yet found the time to write it. Suffice it to say for now that I'm getting up in the morning, cycling to work, working all day, and then either cycling, running, swimming or doing a combination of all three in the evenings. By the time I'm done, sleeping is just about all I'm good for.

Speaking of which, it's way past my bedtime.

A Sunny Day at Lords

2005-07-15T10:54:00.001+01:00

Last Sunday, I was lucky enough to go to Lords to watch a one-day international featuring England and Australia. The cricket wasn’t up to much to be honest, but Lords on a sunny day, packed to the rafters because the Australians are in town is a special place regardless of what actually happens in the game.

As the result drifted inexorably towards the Aussies, my attention wandered and I imagined how the place would look when it plays host to the Olympic archery events in 2012. I got a little shiver of excitement thinking about it.

The reality of what had happened in London the day after the Olympic announcement was never far away. When John and I got off the train in Paddington we asked a policeman for directions to Lords. He started to tell us which Tube we should get, but I interrupted him and told him that we wanted to walk. He gave us directions and we set off. I had an urge to rush back and tell him that we wanted to walk because it was a nice day and it wasn’t far, and not because we were scared to go on the Tube. As we walked to the ground past the high screens and floral tributes at Edgeware Road, I wondered if that was entirely true.

Once we’d picked up our tickets and made it to the ground, another reminder came in the form of a long queue as every bag was searched and every body patted down. By and large no one minded missing the opening few overs in the name of keeping safe, although one big-gobbed Cockney idiot felt the need to hassle the security staff about how long it was taking. That was irritating enough, but when his stage whisper could be heard throughout the minute’s silence that we all observed from outside the North Gate, I was surprised no one took a swing at him.

After the Olympic venue announcement I was very excited by it all. After Thursday’s bombings, that excitement disappeared in the face of such grim reality. But sitting there in the sunshine at Lords on Sunday imagining Olympic archers vying for medals in 2012 brought some of that excitement back again. I suppose in a way we owe it to those who died to carry on – to get excited by the trivialities of sport, to celebrate a society that allows us the freedom to pursue such trivialities, to take the Tube or a bus.

Just by Paddington station, there is a shop that I expect Lord Coe didn’t go out of his way to let the IOC visit when they came to London. I’m not quite sure it captures the ethos of the 2012 bid.

Warning: Lycra!

2005-07-14T11:11:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Adams and Sorrell, the Guardian's live sport coverage is back on the trail of trying to get me to change my name to Troy (see posts at 10:41 and 10:58).

In response to Tim's (frankly disturbing) pleas for photos of me in tight fitting sportswear, I give you the photos that no amount of airbrushing would have made acceptable to publish. Those of a nervous disposition should look away now.

I think it's known in the trade as a farmer's tan.

It may look like I'm pulling a funny face for the camera, but the truth is that those shorts are tighter than a photo finish.

"Nice day... probably rain."

2005-07-13T12:31:00.000+01:00

I was in London last Thursday to meet the guy from the publishing house who had expressed an interest in what I’m doing. Needless to say, other events that day took over somewhat from both the exciting news of London getting the 2012 games and of me meeting a publisher. Simon Barnes in the Times put it well:

“Sport requires a certain innocence. Without innocence, the glorious inconsequentialities of sport could not exist. We demand that people take part in sport as if it were a life-and-death matter, and yet all of us, participants and audience both, know that it is all most frightfully silly. It’s only that without the assumption of seriousness, it wouldn’t be any fun.”

And it’s hard to be serious about silly things when there are serious things going on all around you. Most Londoners set off to work euphoric on Thursday morning after the events in Singapore on Wednesday – in Britain, hope and joy are things that we tend to be reluctant to let ourselves indulge in, but Thursday morning felt good. The games are coming to London; it felt like the world had given us a vote of confidence. Not even the most miserable stereotype of a Briton would have dared suggest the extreme to which we could be whisked in less than 24 hours.

Statue John directed me to a blog he had read with a first-hand account of one of the bombs going off on a Tube train. Stuck in a carriage rapidly filling up with smoke the writer observes:

Once again, calm-down-guy managed to get everyone to do just that. Silence decended on the carriage apart from people choking and coughing, then someone near me quipped, “Well, at least we got the Olympics!”

There’s always one. And yet, at the same time, I understand that urge – the need to normalise it all with a joke – even if the joke betrays your most fervent wish to turn the clock back five minutes to when you were talking about sport and not staring your own death in the face.

I was going to blog about my whole day – about the meeting with Chrysalis; about waiting in the Hilton for the buses to start up again; about the woman sat near me telling her friend how she had hailed the number 30 bus but the driver hadn’t stopped because she had a pram; about finally getting back to Oxford and going for drinks with the Plants cricket team in the evening and seeing again that look of excitement and interest that certain types of people get when they hear about my challenge for the first time; about Stevo the Kiwi drinking enough lemon beer to suggest that he could try and do all the events from the winter Olympics so that between us we’d have the full set; about leaving my keys in the office and having to sleep in Neil’s living room – but in the end, it was hard to see that any of it mattered.

Simon Barnes finished his article, and I’ll finish this post, with something quite apposite:

”Sport is, above all, a celebration of being alive. Those people who willingly and frivolously turn it into a festival of being dead are bastards. Their eagerness to spoil the world’s innocent frivolities spells out the eternal truth about terrorism. It is this: terrorism is not about achieving things; terrorism is an end in itself.”

London get the 2012 Olympics

2005-07-06T13:07:00.000+01:00

"I bet it didn't take you so long to open the envelope with the bribe in it, did it, Jacques?"

I didn’t think I was all that bothered – London and Paris (and it had looked likely to be one of those two for quite some time) are both pretty close by – either way, I’ll be attending the Olympic games in seven years.

Perhaps it was the brilliantly staged, tension-building show the IOC staged to announce the winner, although that’s unlikely, as I only got to a TV two minutes before the announcement, and even then, it was a TV in Dixons surrounded by other TV’s showing music videos.

Perhaps it was the accidental tension that arose when it seemed Jacques Rogge had forgotten how to open an envelope (did it ever take anyone so long? And why even bother? The vote was finalised an hour beforehand – he knew what was in the envelope already – why didn’t he just tell us?).

Perhaps it was the big sweaty man next to me in the shop who muttered “Get on with it!” just loud enough for everyone to hear – something in his urgent desire to know (one way or the other) spread throughout the thirty lunchtime shoppers who were by then staring at the screen.

Perhaps it was because I still remember the addled nonsense that was spouted by the drunken heckler at Stephen Martin’s presentation in February, and in a way I still hoped that London would get the games just to spite her.

Whatever the reason, as I stood there watching the head of the IOC fumble with the envelope, I found myself violently gnawing a fingernail and willing him to say the word “London”

And so he did. The little crowd in Dixons cheered, in that slightly self-conscious way that a ‘crowd’ of less than fifty people tends to, before breaking into a terribly English round of applause. I joined in, with both the cheer and the clapping. The news has cheered me up.

It’s easy to be cynical – about Live8, about the Olympic bid, about anything really – a well-timed cynical comment gets a laugh every time. But, for all their failings, these things have benefits, even if those benefits sometimes aren’t as identifiable or quantifiable as their costs. I’m going to set cynicism aside for a minute and say that I’m delighted London got the 2012 games.

Just as long as it doesn’t mean I have to listen to Heather Small singing that bloody song every five minutes for the next seven years.

Earworms

2005-07-05T19:03:00.000+01:00

Earworms – not my latest injury, but the neat way to describe songs that get stuck in your head during the course of a day. On his blog, Swiss Toni hosts a guest spot every Friday in which he gets a loyal reader to submit their earworms from the week. Inspired by that, I thought I’d list my top five earworms-to-exercise-by. So, in no particular order:

All These Things That I’ve Done – The Killers
This sums up my whole challenge in a way, from its plaintive cries for someone to “help me out” to the spookily-apt-in-my-case line: “I want a meaning from the back of my broken hand” As I’m running along, I imagine a BBC montage of my exploits set to this song. Every time I hear it, that montage gets a bit more elaborate. At the moment, the long, thumping build-up where the singer chants, “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier” features me standing on a 10-metre diving board looking terrified. As it reaches a crescendo, I take off in slow motion and perform an intricate series of twists and turns on my way to a perfect, splash-free entry, drawing gasps from the crowd and a perfect score from the judges. Something tells me that if the montage ever happens it’s more likely to feature an agonising belly-flop set to the music from the Benny Hill Show.

Square One – Coldplay
I suppose the lyrics are quite apt in this song too (“you just want somebody listening to what you say”), but it’s the rhythm I like it for when I’m running. Every time it comes on the iPod I have the same thought: ‘I should seek out other songs with the same time signature to help me run’, but I never do. I had a similar song when I played golf (Moanin’ by Ray Charles) that always got me swinging at a good tempo if I could make it stick in my head, but that’s a hard thing to do. No matter how many times I listened to it on the way to the course, it was always easily dislodged, not least because it doesn’t have any lyrics. I’ve had more than one promising round ruined by a playing partner telling himself to “Wake up!” after a bad shot – you try getting rid of the Boo Radleys when you’re two under after five and trying to hold it together.

Meantime – The Futureheads
This is more a warning to anyone out there who jogs but has a weak heart – don’t ever run and listen to the Futureheads at the same time. Swiss Toni’s description of them as “A new wave barbershop quartet with thick Sunderland accents” doesn’t do justice to the Jam-inspired tempo at which their two-minute songs race to a finish. I found myself utterly out of breath for the first time in a long time last week and wondering why until I realised that while one Coldplay song will get me round a lap, or even a lap and a half of the park, the Futureheads had knocked out half their album by the time I’d made it round the first time, and I was foolishly trying to keep up with them.

Tame – The Pixies
As with the Futureheads, training to the Pixies is fraught with danger. Both bands will probably be useful for sprint training when the time comes, but I suspect that neither of them is doing my triathlon prospects much good. Nirvana were lauded for their ‘revolutionary’ song writing style involving the combination of slower, softer melodious interludes with frantic, neurotic and very, very loud spells of angst ridden guitar thrashing. But they never tried to claim they’d done anything new and freely admitted having copied the Pixies in this respect. So it is that a casual dog walker in the park may have been privy on occasion to the not entirely pretty sight of me suddenly bursting into a bit of a sprint for no apparent reason in the middle of a fairly gentle jog – little does he know that in my mind I’m being chased by an axe-wielding Frank Black who is screeching “Tame!”

Beautiful Day – U2
This song has it all – a good tempo, an uplifting melody, a chorus that makes you want to sing along (which I would advise against whilst running – for one thing, singing when you’ve got headphones on and can’t hear yourself is something to do in the privacy of your own home, but, more importantly, breathing is a key part of both endeavours and trying to do both at once is a bit like trying to talk on the phone while you’re playing the bassoon). Of course, when ITV used this song as their football show theme tune a few years ago, the sporting connection was sealed. On that note, another word of caution – listening to this song whilst running in the park can lead to you embarrassingly trying to join in with children’s football games as though they’re hearing the music too. They aren’t – and if their watching parents get even a little bit nervous about just how tight your Lycra running tights are, you could be looking at a seven stretch.

***

Inspired by the above tracks, triathlon training is still going well, even if I have been focusing rather too heavily on the running in recent weeks. I finally ordered my wetsuit and my triathlon outfit (very camp) yesterday. When said items arrive I will of course do my best to match Tim’s startling efforts to land a catalogue modelling deal before hopping on my bike and cycling to the swimming pool, or maybe even a swimming lake!

A Little Help From Henman

2005-06-26T21:26:00.000+01:00

Tim Henman reacts to the news that the Guardian have posted a link to this website.

So Henman crashed out of Wimbledon in the first week, denying thousands of housewives all over Britain their chance to screech "Come on, Tim!" at the television for the rest of the tournament. Still, every cloud has a silver lining, and this cloud is no different.

While the housewives bite their fingernails and plead with the television, the Guardian website (Guardian Unlimited) does a sterling job of providing the office-bound masses with a means of following Wimbledon from the comfort of their desks. In the case of Tim’s calamitous loss last week, Sean Ingle was the game-by-game correspondent keeping the nation up to speed with proceedings at SW19.

The format is simple: Sean sits in his office watching the match on TV and posts updates to the website as events unfold. He also fields e-mails from those of us following his commentary, occasionally beefing up his analysis with the nonsense he receives.

I loaded up the page in good time on Thursday afternoon, only to find that at five past one Mr Ingle still hadn’t posted any preamble. I e-mailed him, and so it was that his second post read:

We’re off! Tursunov to serve. Meanwhile John McClure (who may or may not be related to the fictional Simpson’s character, Troy) is in fighting mood: "Hurry up, Ingle," he says. "Step away from the strawberries and get with it." Will do, John. Once they’ve finished warming up.

I’ve had the odd e-mailed comment posted on the Guardian’s over-by-over cricket coverage over the years, but as far as I can remember, this was my first appearance on the tennis coverage. I was quite chuffed. I e-mailed back and, a mere five posts later, I was in again.

First set: Tursunov* 2-3 Henman I'd be lying if I said this was scintillating feast of tennis - both men are making mistakes, and finding the net more times than Andrei Shevchenko. However Tursunov holds on, despite facing five breakpoints in his last two service games. Meanwhile John McClure (see earlier email) is back. "I'm no relation to the Simpson's star, but I have been offered money to name my first-born 'Troy'," he writes, sadly declining to mention just how much.

Of course, that required a response too, so I took a shameless punt to see if I could get Sean Ingle to tell the nation about the Ultimate Olympian. Sure enough, eight posts later (and I should warn those of you who find foul language offensive that Mr Ingle does nothing to sanitise Tiger Tim’s potty mouth in this one):

Second set: Henman leads Tursunov* 6-3, 1-3 "Come on!" cries Henman as he recovers from 40-15 down to have a breakpoint. The inevitable screams follow but it does little good as Tursunov wins the next two points. Henman fights back to earn another chance, but Tursunov produces an amazing drop volley to hold. The British No1's response? A loud "Fucccccccccccccccccck!" - but amazingly the umpire does nothing. Meanwhile John McClure is back. "I'm doing all 136 Olympic sports", he writes. "If your avid readers can contribute a grand to the charity I'm doing it for, I'll change my name and enter next year's London marathon as Troy McClure." Well, any takers?

Like I said, it was a shameless attempt at self-promotion, but it worked - the "136 Olympic sports" bit was posted as a link to this site. Still, no one was going to pledge any money for something quite so silly as me changing my name, right? Wrong. A mere three posts later:

Second set: henman leads Tursunov* 6-3, 2-5 Another Henman service game, another struggle. From 0-30 down he recovers to 40-30, only for the Russian to win the next three points. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. "Which charity is John McClure supporting?" asks Luke Williams. "If it's a good 'un, and if the offer is verifiable, I'll put up £50 notes." Top work, Luke. Anyone else?

Crikey. But still, a grand is a long way off fifty quid. I e-mailed again. Two posts later:

Third set: Henman* - Tursunov* 6-3, 2-6, 1-0 After watching his serve go into meltdown in the second set, Tiger Tim holds comfortably to 15. "The charity is the Sobell House Hospice," says John McClure. "They provide care for people with life-limiting illness and support for their families. It's a very worthy cause. And I'm off to the Deed Poll website."

And so I was. To my dismay, according to the website, it seemed perfectly legal and entirely inexpensive for me to change my name to ‘Troy’, even if only for the duration of a marathon. I got a slightly sick feeling in my stomach at that point.

I thought about how I’d react to hearing of some stranger doing something similar - the vehemence with which I’d call him an idiot - and I thought about that occasionally asked question on forms one has to fill out, ‘Have you ever been known by any other name?’

Thankfully, the tennis suddenly got exciting at that point and all talk of me changing my name subsided. The end of the match arrived and I had received no word from Sean Ingle that the thousand pound target had been reached. I logged off, slightly relieved.

A co-worker came over to my desk. “Getting a good bit of publicity there!” he enthused, presumably having spent the afternoon juggling work and tennis coverage himself. “You never know who might be reading!” he added. I agreed - you never do know. Even so, I was quite surprised to find an e-mail in my in-box the following morning with the subject ‘Book deal?’

It would seem that Ben Heywood from Chrysalis Books Group had also been keeping an eye on the tennis via the Guardian. He’d followed the link Sean Ingle had kindly provided to this site and made a few phone calls.

I’ll not go into too much detail yet, but suffice it to say for now that, by the end of Friday, Ben had not only sent my contact details to the editor of the relevant imprint at Chrysalis (Robson Books), but he had also (thanks largely to some apparent goading on the part of the rest of his office) agreed to be my partner for a synchronised diving event.

He was careful to stipulate that he’d commit to the 3m springboard, but only offer his services for the 10m platform provisional to his form in the former event. Oh, and that he would wear Speedos for no man.

I’ve since e-mailed the Southampton Diving Academy to see if they would be willing to help us out. Ben will no doubt be relieved to hear that they haven’t come back to me yet.

Needless to say, I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

[The full transcript of Sean Ingle’s commentary is here in case you missed it.]

***

In other news:

Triathlon training is going reasonably well, if not in terms of quantity, then certainly in terms of quality. This week, I have done something that I’ve never done in my life before - I’ve enjoyed running. Better still, on one run, I started off feeling dreadful and hating every step, but ran through that and was really enjoying myself by the time I got home again.

This afternoon I ran for 25 minutes (five laps of the park at the end of the road). That doesn’t sound like much I’m sure – probably about 6km - but when I think back to how I felt several weeks ago after a mere seven minutes (and one lap of the park), it feels like hefty progress.

Of course, to get to the running stage of the triathlon, I need to first not drown for a mile and then cycle a marathon. I’m off to bed shortly so I can get up for a swim before work tomorrow.

Golf vs Triathlon

2005-06-13T16:29:00.000+01:00

I really enjoy playing golf, but perhaps not quite as much as these guys.

Several weeks ago, I was faced with a choice about what to do with the weekend that has just passed. In one direction, Tim was pulling at my sense of guilt and fear and trying to get me to go and do a half-triathlon with him in preparation for the main event in London in August. The other option was to go home to Northern Ireland and play in a not-very-serious golf competition being hosted by a close friend of my family.

In the end, I made my promises to the golf competition and my excuses to Tim. I didn’t want to risk injuring myself in the run-up to the main event – or, perhaps more truthfully, I didn’t want to risk terrifying myself to a sufficient extent that I pulled out of the main event altogether.

This morning, having read Tim’s blog entry about his race experience, I’m sure I made the right decision. Go and read it, then come back and read how my weekend’s sporting endeavours panned out in comparison.

The night before I faced my weekend’s sporting event, while Tim was no doubt forcing down as much spaghetti as he could lay his hands on and washing it down with an energy drink before getting an early night, I was basking in the warm glow of family and friends (not to mention a delicious 1995 Gran Reserva Rioja and a cigar) and arguing about the nuances of the rules of golf with my dad until half one in the morning.

Tim’s race day probably started with an uncomfortably early alarm call, followed swiftly by having to force some food down into a nervous stomach. Mine started with a gentle two-mile run to knock the edge of the previous night’s indulgences, followed by a leisurely drive around visiting yet more family and friends and eating breakfast as I went.

As the triathletes tugged themselves into wetsuits, I was wandering about the practice ground wondering whether I ought to try and find some sun cream from somewhere. As the neoprene-clad warriors were stretching soon-to-be-aching muscles, I was giving up on hitting practice shots and heading to the bar for a sandwich and a glass of wine. Halfway through Tim’s event, he thought he was going to drown. Halfway through mine, we stopped for a beer.

When Tim had finished his half triathlon, he was sat quaffing recovery drinks and feeling glad not to be dead. When I had finished my golf, I was sat drinking pints of Guinness in the sunshine feeling glad to be alive.

His evening was most likely spent gently nursing his injuries and knotted muscles. Mine was spent stuffing my face, dealing with some awkward questions (“John! How long are you back for? What are you drinking?”) and dancing with my mother to dodgy cover versions.

In fact, the only thing that threatened to take the edge off my weekend was the text message from Tim at ten o’clock on Sunday morning telling me that the swimming is a tad harder than I’d been hoping for. When it arrived, I hadn’t been in bed all that long, and it would be fair to say that I’d maybe had a little more to drink the night before than would be considered prudent for the average athlete. It was OK though, the fear it instilled instantly cancelled out the power of my hangover.

I’ll always be more of a golfer than a triathlete, but I think I had better order my wetsuit sooner rather than later.

Swimming Lessons

2005-06-09T21:44:00.000+01:00

Photographic proof that I've always been this good looking.*

Before Tuesday night, I’m not sure when I last had a swimming lesson, but I’m going to take a punt and suggest that it was at least 20 years ago. Said lesson was given by a tall, lanky man called John. Other than that, we didn’t have much in common. He could swim underwater for a whole length of the 25-metre pool at the Avoniel Leisure Centre with a physical elegance that deserted him on land. I could spit water at my sister.

When I was younger still, the mentor entrusted with making sure I didn’t drown was the mother of a school friend. I imagine whole generations of children grew up feeling the same way about that woman. She was kind and caring and gentle, and you loved the fact that she was teaching you how to do something as important as swimming, but underneath all that, there was a simmering fear of, and something bordering on childish hatred for, the woman who first dared deflate one half of your bright orange water-wings.

It was all very well for her – she was on dry land. Mind you, even if she hadn’t been, the water in the learner’s pool would only have come up to her waist. We, on the other hand, poor, vertically challenged wretches that we were, having been rendered suddenly sinkable by her cavalier approach to armband deflation, had to try and make it to the other side of the pool (fully eight metres) without drowning.

She was encouraging and complimentary about our efforts but, beneath that, she was tough. Yes, you made it across without drowning, but you weren’t kicking your legs quite right. And it might be easier if you opened your goggle-protected eyes every so often to look where you’re going. And put your tongue back in your mouth even though you’re concentrating.

A few years later, I had an odd experience involving my swimming instructor’s sister. During a school trip to Holland, a nasty crazy-golf accident left me with blood pouring out of a cut in my forehead. As luck would have it, my swimming instructor’s sister was a nurse living in Amsterdam and had come to visit us that day (to see her niece). She examined my head and declared that I’d probably survive, but that I ought to have a couple of ‘plastic stitches’ just in case.

As she applied said stitches (which turned out to be not nearly as glamorous as I’d hoped for), I winced. Her hand held my head perfectly still and in it I could feel that same force her sister had dished out from the poolside. I’m not trying to be mean, but if you’d just do what I’m telling you to do this would all be so much easier.

Memories of all of these things came flooding back as my latest instructor put me through my paces in the pool two nights ago.

A tall, lithe South African triathlete, she had already been good enough to spend half an hour talking to me about how to prepare for the fast-approaching London Triathlon. She dispensed pearls of wisdom that I eagerly stored away (and wrote down later) about everything from training schedules to dietary requirements as though everyone knew about them.

Her biggest concern about my approach to the race was not how little training I have done or am doing, but that I was planning to do the swim using my most comfortable stroke – breaststroke. She pointed out that wearing a wetsuit would make my legs much more buoyant and I’d find myself struggling to get my top half high enough out of the water to breathe comfortably. “How bad can your crawl be?” she asked.

Ten minutes later, I was in the pool showing her just how bad it can be. To give her credit, she didn’t laugh at my hopeless flailing. Instead, she brought me a float designed to be held between the legs and suggested I try a couple of lengths without kicking. I was a child again – elbows on the side of the pool, looking up at a kind face telling me that “That wasn’t too bad, but maybe if you just try doing it this way instead.”

I tried a couple of lengths with the float. Breathing in became much easier, but I kept forgetting to breathe out first. After the first length, I was on the verge of hyperventilating. Again, my efforts were applauded before another drill was instigated. This one involved lying on my side with my lower arm outstretched and my upper one by my side. I was only allowed to kick my legs, and when I wanted to breathe, I had to roll over rather than whip my head out of the water.

Again, getting a breath in wasn’t too much trouble – getting it out again without getting water up my nose was a different matter. I coughed and spluttered my way back to my instructor who had one more drill for me to try. This one involved swimming like an underwater James Bond bad guy henchman – with both arms held by my side and furiously kicking my legs. Breathing again involved rolling to either side when I felt the need.

As I swam two lengths like this, that long forgotten but immediately familiar childish hatred welled up in me again. Why couldn’t I just do it the way that felt comfortable? Swimming was supposed to be fun, and this wasn’t. Why couldn’t I just go and spit water at my sister? I returned to the top of the pool to receive my commendation and await the sentence that began “But if you just…”

Instead I was met with “Right – now try swimming two lengths of crawl – just normally.”

So I did – and suddenly, without warning, I felt like I could do it. I was breathing to alternate sides with every third stroke and before I knew it I was at the other end, confidence already soaring so high that I found myself contemplating a tumble-turn (a skill I have never possessed) – fortunately, I thought better of it just in time.

I felt a great rush of gratitude to all the people who have had anything to do with teaching me how to swim over the years. Contrary to what my ego would like to think, I didn’t just pop into the world able to do it – I had to be taught. Someone had to be firm with me and make me do it a different way than the way I wanted to – the right way – the way that meant it would work.

I’m learning a lot from doing this whole thing – about sport in general, about certain sports in particular, about the people I encounter who help (and the people I encounter who don’t), and about myself. I’m learning that I’m usually far to eager to try and do things the way I want to do them, to stay within what I perceive to be my comfort zone, instead of trusting the people who know what they’re doing to teach me how to do it right. I’m learning that in the end, the instructors invariably break me down and I do it their way – and then I have these epiphanies about how much easier their way is.

Life, eh? Bloody hell.

***

* Swiss Toni, the keenest member of Team Ultimate Olympian for the London Triathlon, has been posting pictures of himself in lycra and neoprene over on his blog. He suggested I do the same ASAP, but for now, the picture above is about as close as I can get to his epic poses.

Hampered by a Picnic

2005-06-04T13:46:00.001+01:00

Jamie wasn't the first athlete to fall victim to the dreaded picnic hamper.

Ever since Jamie dropped out of the 50 km walk last week to “protect his softball season”, I’ve been trying to remember where I’d read about something similar happening before in an Olympic games. Finally, I found the story I was looking for in Geoff Tibballs’ book The Olympics’ Strangest Moments.

‘The 1912 Olympic marathon [in Stockholm] more than lived up to the reputation for drama set by its predecessors. Run in unusually hot conditions for Scandinavia, it witnessed the first Olympic death, a victory marred by accusations of broken promises and, most bizarrely of all, a runner who dropped out halfway to join a family picnic!

‘… Further down the field [Shizo] Kanaguri was struggling to cope with the heat. In a state of near collapse he stumbled into the garden of a Swedish family who were enjoying a picnic on that glorious summer afternoon. Invited to join the gathering, he needed no second invitation and, after being refreshed with drinks of raspberry juice, he accepted their generous offer of a bed on which to lay his weary head.

‘When he awoke, it was far too late to rejoin the race and so the family gave him clothing and put him on a train back to Stockholm. Embarrassed at having failed to complete the marathon, he decided not to tell anyone and quietly caught a boat back to Japan.’

Sadly, the day after the marathon, The Portuguese record holder, Francisco Lazaro, died in hospital having collapsed during the race.

‘While the Olympic fraternity mourned the loss of Lazaro, officials were trying to locate the other 33 runners who had failed to finish because of the extreme heat. All were accounted for except one – Shizo Kanaguri. Unaware that he had fled the country, the officials called in the Swedish police in a bid to find him and when the search proved fruitless, he was officially declared a missing person.

‘Kanaguri’s whereabouts became something of a joke in Sweden – akin to sightings of Lord Lucan in Britain in the 1970s – and some claimed he was still running around the streets trying to find his way back to the stadium. Other ‘sightings’ revealed that he had last been seen with a beautiful Swedish girl on each arm.

‘In 1962, on the fiftieth anniversary of the race, a Stockholm journalist was despatched o Japan to track down the elusive runner and found him teaching geography in the town of Tamana. Kanaguri had no idea that he had achieved cult status in Sweden.

‘Five years later, at the age of 76, he returned to Stockholm to open a new department store. From there he was taken to the Olympic stadium where, to the delight of the Swedes, he finally jogged across the finish line… to complete a marathon that he had begun 55 years earlier.’

There’s a lesson there for us all.

But I’m not sure what it is.

The 50 km Walk

2005-05-31T22:39:00.000+01:00

Don't let anyone tell you that speed walking can't be sexy.

A last minute change of venue saw the 50 km walk begin 600 metres from the gate lodge of the University Parks. The combination of a stiff breeze and some not so stiff resolve amongst some of the competitors inspired the change - I reckoned that the trees in the park would prevent the worst of the wind from hindering our progress as it might have done on the more exposed towpath.

The day began with the withdrawal of the competitor who had travelled the furthest to be in the race. Keir had suffered a terrible tourism injury the day before due to some dodgy shoes and too much strolling around Oxford with me. He had blisters. Lots of them. He couldn’t walk to the car without wincing, let alone try and walk more than 30 miles.

Amazingly, despite sending me a text message at two in the morning to let me know that “I’m in the Zodiac [nightclub]... Hooray!” Jamie arrived almost on time, albeit preparing his temple-like body for an endurance race with a large coffee.

We set off down the Banbury road towards the park. I started walking at about the pace I expected would be comfortable. No one came with me. I put my head down and ploughed on, sure someone would catch up.

We got to the park and started the first of nineteen laps. I was followed closely enough by Gareth and Deneal to be able to show them the route. On the first lap, I suffered my first injury of the day. Walking under some low-hanging branches, something caught in my cap. Without thinking, I grabbed whatever it was and ripped it off without breaking stride.

I looked down at my hand. It had several thorns sticking out of it and was bleeding a little. I spent the rest of lap one removing thorns with my teeth and trying to keep my arm elevated to stop the bleeding. Halfway into the second lap, the blood had stopped and I had opened up enough of a lead to no longer be able to see anyone behind me. I began to entertain the notion that I could lap them all.

Like a pack of slavering dogs, they set out to walk me down.

As the lap wore on, I became aware of a new problem; my bladder was full and wasn’t happy about all the jiggling around. I dived into the bushes and did what had to be done. As I stood there, desperately hoping that no one had seen me duck behind a tree, I noticed that my feet hurt. This was slightly alarming, as I’d only just passed one-tenth distance. The pain went away as soon as I started walking again, but the fear that I was damaging my delicate size twelves remained.

Lots of things ran through my mind as I walked - thoughts ranging from “I’m going to lap them all... twice!” when I was feeling good, to “I could just nip into the undergrowth and have a kip for an hour or two here and they’d never know.” when I wasn’t. But the thoughts that wouldn’t go away were the ones about my Dark Nemesis.

The regular reader, or anyone who has ever been in my house, will know her as Boo, the little black kitten who owns the place. She has never been one to stay out of the house for long, so, by Saturday morning, I was more than a little anxious that she hadn’t been seen since Thursday night.

We’ve all done it - lobbed a piece of paper at the bin having decided that if it goes in our favourite team will win the European Cup, or kicked a stone along a footpath far enough that we’re sure it will make our numbers come up on Saturday’s Lotto. As I plodded along, I kept telling myself that if I completed the distance, Boo would be sitting on the doorstep waiting for me when I got home.

The thought sustained me, perhaps like nothing else could have done, and by the time I stopped to deal with my bladder a second time during the ninth lap, I hardly noticed how much worse my feet were feeling.

Deneal (at the back) also demonstrated that you can look cool AND be a good walker.

As I rounded the corner to begin my 12th lap, I found the opposition spread out on the grass having a picnic. Lapping them hadn’t proved to be quite as much of a challenge as I’d expected. Thankfully, as we sledged each other and I marched on past, Deneal got up and came with me.

Walking alone had been fine, but having company gave me a boost and I began to feel a lot more confident that I could make it to the finish. I babbled 12 laps-worth of pent-up conversation at Deneal in the space of a kilometre.

Jamie demonstrated some impressive technique before retiring from the race.

We ploughed on, the whole thing being made somehow easier for me because Deneal was going to have to do an extra lap once I’d collapsed in a heap by the finish line. Already collapsed in a heap by the finish line was Jamie who had decided that picnics were more fun than walking (I told you he was easily distracted). I passed marathon distance in not much over 5 hours and felt greatly encouraged that when the time comes I might even be able to finish one!

With two laps left, I began to feel in real danger of falling over. My legs had turned to jelly. I could feel the blisters forming on my feet. I was trying so hard to walk without causing myself pain that I kept missing my step and almost stumbling. Into the final lap, with about 2 kilometres left to go, I told Deneal to go ahead. He was clearly feeling a lot stronger than I was, and my shambling, drunk-looking amble was slowing him down.

As soon as he was gone, I felt sorry I’d suggested it. I was all over the place without someone to try and keep up with. It seems ridiculous now, but at one point, no more than 500 metres from the finish, I had a lengthy mind battle with a park bench that looked like possibly the most comfortable seat I’d ever seen. If I hadn’t been so sure that I was only half a kilometre from getting my cat to come home, I might well have sat down.

As I rounded the final bend for the final time to rapturous applause from the gallery (Jamie, Lisa and Jules), I got down on my knees and then lay down on my face, moaning. The gallery laughed at my imitation of an exhausted man, probably because it was so convincing, given that I was exactly that.

The pain arrived very quickly. The insides of my thighs were like concrete and felt like they would cramp up at any minute. I had fantasised about taking my shoes off for at least ten laps before the end, but now I was scared by the state I might find my feet in. A new pain arrived in my left big toe. It seemed to say “Hi! I’m just going to take your toenail away, ok?”

By the time the rest of the field had finished, I felt like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz when he ran out of oil. I tried several times to stand up and stretch, but the muscles refused point blank to do as I asked. I was thrilled to have done the walk so quickly - actually, I was just thrilled to have done the thing at all - but I was worried that I might have done myself some lasting damage. Somehow, I eventually shuffled to the car and we headed home.

Thank you all so much for taking part (even you, Keir, for taking pictures and helping me with my training in the run in to the event), it was a big help to have company and get another event ticked off the list.

Result of Athletics - 50 km Walk:

1st – John McClure – 6 hrs 15 mins
2nd – Deneal Smith – 6 hrs 32 mins (including picnic)
3rd – Tim Sorrell – 6 hrs 48 mins (including picnic)
4th (and therefore winner of the women’s race) – Caitlin Bailey – 6 hrs 49 mins (including picnic)
5th (and therefore beaten by a girl) – Gareth Forber – 6 hrs 52 mins (including picnic)
Retired - Jamie Parish - 12 laps (the ultimate picnic)

***

When we got back, Boo still hadn’t come home. On Sunday, a woman called to say that she’d seen a black cat get hit up on the bypass on Thursday night. We found what was left of Boo later that evening. I can only suspect (and hope) from what we found that she didn’t know what was happening until it was all over. I’ll miss her very much. I feel bad now that I never let her come running with me all those times she wanted to.

So... much... pain...

2005-05-28T19:30:00.000+01:00

6 hours 15 minutes.

I'll write it up properly when I can move without wincing.

Preamble

2005-05-26T12:38:00.000+01:00

To get myself in the mood for the 50 km walk, which is taking place on Saturday (still time to join the field if you feel so inclined), I’ve been reading ‘The Long Walk’ by Richard Bachman (the alter-ego of Stephen King).

The book is about a futuristic gameshow that consists of 100 young men walking south from the US - Canadian border. Armed soldiers in a vehicle that follows the field monitor the pace of each walker. If a walker’s pace falls below four miles an hour, he receives a warning. If it happens again, he receives another warning. If it happens again, he gets... another warning. But if it happens a fourth time, he gets shot.

They walk day and night without cease. There is no finish line. The winner is the last man standing.

Not surprisingly, the International Olympic Committee’s rules for ‘The Long Walk’ are slightly less stringent. Anyone falling below a pace of four miles an hour on Saturday will be laughed at and then nagged to hurry up rather than shot. Anyone wishing to quit because they have blisters, cramps, or a general lack of resolve can similarly expect no worse than a bit of light mocking, as opposed to having to stare down the business end of an AK-47.

As was the case with the 20 km walk, the adoption of strict race walking technique will be discouraged in favour of a brisk stroll in order to keep the waiting lists for hip replacement operations down where possible. The field will consist of the following athletes (for want of a more accurate description):

Me - The Ultimate Olympian - 25 to 1
Despite my usual fastidious preparation for this event, my odds have rocketed with the announcement that the field will be joined by none other than Keir Simpson. Keir couldn’t out-walk me even if there were guns involved, but he can (and will) drink me under the table from the moment he arrives on Thursday.

Keir - The Ultimate Liver - 20 to 1
He’s a tall man, but his legs are surprisingly short. He’ll fancy himself to do well, but his determination to prevent me from finishing in a respectable time may hamper his own progress too, so his odds remain like his spine... long.

Gareth - The Ultimate Horse - 12 to 1
Having displayed good form in some other events, Gareth ‘The Dark Horse’ Forber isn’t expected to live up to his nickname in this event. The bookies fancy him better over a shorter course and are concerned that his trainer may have landed him in over his head this time.

Jamie - The Ultimate Fidget - 10 to 1
A man who literally can’t sit still, Jamie’s restless nature could come in handy in an event that will require a lot of energy. His odds would be lower, but they try to take account of the fact that he could get bored and wander off in the wrong direction in search of real ale.

Deneal - The Ultimate Doctor - 5 to 1
This mathematical genius is sure to have figured out the path of least resistance from Lechlade to Oxford, and of the entire field, he is the least likely to have underestimated just how far 50 km is. The word on the street is that the Doc has been putting in the hours in training - his odds reflect this. He may even have been joint favourite at one point, with only a disparity of several inches in stride length between himself and the favourite to blame for his slip to second place in the running.

Caitlin - The Ultimatrix - 5 to 1
Fitter than the rest of the field combined, Caitlin would have been the favourite to wipe the floor with us all, but for the fact that she knows how fragile Tim's ego is and will undoubtedly let him cross the line first rather than have to deal with the tantrum that would ensue if he doesn't. As the only member of the fairer sex in the competition, she's the odds-on favourite for the women's race.

Tim - The Ultimate Triathlete - 3 to 1 favourite
Having taken the revolutionary approach to triathlon training of actually sticking to the schedule that he drew up for himself several weeks ago, Tim’s recent trip to his Korean training camp is bound to stand him in good stead for this one. He has the physique, he has the fitness, and he has the will-to-win of a true champion. Not so much a walk by the Thames for him as a walk in the park.

Non-runner: number 3, John Adams. We all wish John a speedy and full recovery from the debilitating illness that seems to render him glued to the sofa for a week every time he tries to do something more energetic than change the TV channel.

The field will remain open until the last possible minute, so if you want to come along, drop me an e-mail; we’re going to aim for a ten o’clock start from Lechlade this Saturday.

Reviewing Canoeing

2005-04-25T19:19:00.000+01:00

Once again, I find myself trying to work out whether or not I’ve “had a go” at an Olympic discipline to a sufficient degree to tick it off the list. Last weekend’s antics have certainly left a mark – several marks in fact – I have bruises all over my knees and thighs from trying to get out of a capsized slalom kayak.

After much thought, I have decided that, far from getting “all eleven canoeing events knocked off in a weekend” as I had originally (and quite ridiculously) thought I might, I have actually completed just one of them to a sufficient standard to tick it off the list without feeling dishonest.

Said event is the K-1 slalom. Under the watchful eye of a man who twice competed at the discipline in the Olympics and now coaches the Great Britain Olympic team, I paddled to the best of my ability on a white water slalom course. The fact that ‘the best of my ability’ involved me nearly drowning twice and managing to go through the grand total of one slalom gate at the very bottom (and least violent part) of the course is neither here nor there.

After much e-mail discussion with Tim, a consensus was reached that any further attempts on the white water would not only be fruitless, but also just downright dangerous. It has been suggested that perhaps a trip down the white water on a raft might be a good idea, to give me a feel for just how terrifying it must be in a canoe. I like the idea of that – from what I can gather, you don’t get quite so firmly wedged into a raft that you risk losing a leg trying to get out of it when things go pear-shaped.

Shaun Cavern, he of the flatwater expertise, suggested I come back to Nottingham another time and have a go in “something a bit more stable” than a fully-fledged K-1 sprint boat. I look forward to taking him up on that offer some time before the summer of 2008. I’d like to at least record a time for the 500 and 1000 metres in order to put the pro’s abilities into some sort of context.

One little factoid that Shaun threw out there that gives an idea of the speeds involved: the top guys can move a K-4 boat sufficiently fast that a young child could water-ski behind it. I suggested we might have more luck if I strapped on a pair of water-skis and let them try it with me – it’s not that I am claiming any talent in that direction, I’m just comforted by the fact that ‘soaked to the skin’ is the state you’re expected to be in by the end of that pursuit.

I’d also like to have a go in a Canadian canoe on the flat. I don’t think they have a beginner’s version of that, so my only chance to complete 500 metres in one would probably be to sink it somewhere deep. If I did it after the K-4 water-ski, at least I’d already be wet.

But for now, in terms of the canoeing events, it’s one down, ten to go – and overall? Nine down, one hundred and nineteen to go. It would be fair to say that I’m a little behind schedule.

The next big event in the diary is the 50 km walk. If you want to take part, drop me a mail and I’ll send you a sponsorship form.

In the meantime, if you have been inspired to give canoeing a go – it’s really not as hard as I made it look I’m sure, and, even if it is, it’s still lots of fun - here are some links that will help you on your way:

British Canoe Union
(Including their guide to getting started)

The National Water Sports Centre

Paddling.net

JoJaffa goes Canoeing!

Splash II

2005-04-19T22:34:00.000+01:00

The course was 'turned right down' due to 'an incident' the day before.

After Saturday’s soaking, I woke with a fluttering in my stomach on Sunday – I would put it down to the River Trent and all the wondrous things I might have swallowed the day before, but I would be lying to myself and to you. I was just nervous.

After we left Shaun Cavern on Saturday, Tim and I took a wander up to the white water slalom course. I imagine that it looks fairly intimidating at the best of times, but it was made all the more so by having half a dozen children zipping about on the water like they’d been born in a kayak. Not only was I likely to fail miserably on Sunday - I was likely to fail miserably where so many nine year-olds had succeeded before me.

Ian Raspin, coach to the Great Britain Olympic team, met us at the course bright and early on Sunday morning. He’s a stocky little man with a friendly manner and a ready smile that puts you instantly at ease, even if you can see that, behind that, there clearly lies a character who would walk through brick walls to get to whatever he wanted.

He explained that there had been 'an incident' on the white water the day before and that unfortunately it was closed. I tried very hard to look disappointed rather than relieved. He suggested we get kitted up and have a paddle about on the practice lakes in the meantime, and then maybe we could sneak on at the bottom of the course later on. It wasn’t the complete abandonment I was secretly hoping for, but it was a start.

As he helped me shove my knees into the kayak, Ian explained that you don’t get many slalom racers over six-foot tall. I didn’t mind the cramped conditions at all – I felt a lot safer than I had the day before (one's knees stick out of a racing boat).

This was ironic – a couple of hours later, it would be my excessively long legs that would be preventing me from sliding out of my capsized kayak quite as elegantly and safely as Ian made it sound like I’d be able to.

While the sprint boat is designed to go as fast as possible in a straight line, the slalom boat is designed to be as manoeuvrable as possible and to provide a bit more buoyancy than I had previously enjoyed. This was a good thing and a bad thing – I wasn’t quite as fearful of tipping the boat over as I had been the day before, but I was showing a nasty tendency to go round and round in circles.

After half an hour on one practice lake, we paddled through to another one that had some slalom gates strung out across it. Ian zipped between them with the consummate ease you would expect from a double Olympian, adjusting them with one hand while he paddled with the other. He pulled four gates into a straight line and suggested I might like to try and paddle through them.

On the practice lake with Ian Raspin, a real Olympian!

I resisted the temptation to scoff at the level of simplicity. I also resisted (briefly) the temptation to swear as I missed the first gate completely despite having started my run less than twenty feet from it. Sadly, the lake had no current running through it that I could blame.

After an hour in the gated lake, I was just about able to get through four gates in a straight line, albeit with a very dainty little pirouette in the middle of my run. Ian seized the moment:

“Because of what happened yesterday, they’ve turned the speed of the white water right down today, so I think you might be ready to hit the bottom of the course and see if we can get you to go through a gate on the moving water, what do you think?”

“Absolutely. That would be great!” I lied. “What did happen yesterday?”

“It’s very sad. Someone died I’m afraid.”

“My god!”

“I know - it’s terrible. Anyway, I’ll nip back and get you a helmet and so on and then we can wander down.”

And with that he turned around and paddled back to the centre, leaving me to think about the fact that someone had died on the course the day before. Now, it turns out that the poor soul who passed away on Saturday might have died regardless of where he was at the time, but on Sunday, as I stood looking at the white water and waited for Ian to come back, the connection between dying and canoeing seemed fairly strong and not a little daunting.

When we finally made it to the water’s edge and I started folding myself into my boat again, I was reminded of Ian’s comment on the phone the first time we had spoken: “If you’ve never been in a kayak before, there’s about as much chance of you getting down the white water course at all, even without gates, as there is of the sky falling in.”

I don’t think that is quite right – I think I could live in a kayak for the next twenty years and still not make it down alive. As I shoved off from the side of the course I couldn’t help but wonder how much more terrified I might have been if the water hadn’t been ‘turned right down’.

As long as I let the water move me and didn’t try to paddle against it, I felt reasonably secure, but as Ian tried to teach me the basic technique of paddling across the current from one eddy to another I felt any semblance of confidence I’d built up begin to ebb away.

"I wonder what the bottom of this one looks like..."

Sure enough, on my first full-blooded attempt to cross the course, I capsized. Far from the instantly amusing spectacle this had created the day before, I found myself unable to get out of the boat.

Ian had talked me through how to do it at great length, but strangely, with my head touching the bottom and the boat clinging to my legs as the water gushed all around me, I completely forgot everything useful he had told me and started trying to do some as yet undiscovered version of the breaststroke like some demented tortoise with a canoe for a shell.

Ian to the rescue as I gasp for air like a drowning tortoise.

Ian was laughing as he fished me out, but I was sure I’d been mere moments from drowning. I’ve since watched the video. I was probably under the water for about four and half seconds – five at the very outside.

"Not now, Kato! Can't you see I'm drowning?"

I went snowboarding once. I was handy enough at it and loved it for the first ten minutes. Then I crashed, and that was the end of that. From that moment on, I was a nervous wreck and couldn’t commit to any movement I made for fear of falling. As a consequence, I fell over a lot.

This same scenario was now in full flow on the slalom course. Having drained the boat, I got back in and paddled out into the current again. When I let it take me where it wanted to I was fine, but the instant I tried to move in any direction the water didn’t want me to go, I was all over the place. I lasted another ten minutes before I once again found myself underwater.

This time I tried to stay calm. I reached down and pulled the cover off my legs and set about trying to pull my legs out of the boat. But I was upside down, and my face hit the bottom, and the water was thundering in my ears, and I couldn’t breathe. I abandoned my calm approach and resorted to the demented tortoise impression. Fortunately, Ian was there again to pull me out.

It had a curious taste - not unlike a pair of three-day-old damp socks on a radiator.

They say ‘once bitten; twice shy’ – I’m not sure what the saying is for when you’ve been bitten twice, but I suspect it might end with the word ‘petrified’. If it doesn’t, it should. Ian sensed my increasing fear and suggested that maybe I should try and get it through one gate for the camera and we could call it a day.

I just about managed it, but only because Ian had the decency to pull the thing into the middle of the course – directly over the line anything buoyant would have taken if you’d chucked it into the river.

We climbed out of our boats and headed back up the hill to shower and drink Coke (the fact that the latter helps kill any nastiness you might have swallowed in the river is both pleasing and slightly worrying at the same time).

I will write more about this sport in the days to come, but for now I can only end with thanks – to Ian for answering Tim’s e-mail in the first place and for giving up his Sunday to help – to Shaun for doing likewise with his Saturday – and to both of them for offering to help again in the future if they can. If I can meet generosity like theirs in every sport I have to complete, this challenge will be a doddle!

Ian Raspin - what a thoroughly bloody nice chap.

Making a Splash

2005-04-18T21:38:00.000+01:00

Can I canoe? Can I bobbins.

It’s possible that this sport may define the phrase the TV commentators love to bandy about - “It’s not as easy as these athletes make it look.”

That said, it might not be quite as difficult as I was making it look.

Saturday morning was all about the flatwater. Shaun Cavern, expert canoeing coach, met Tim (expert cameraman) and me (distinctly inexpert canoeing wannabe) at the finish line of the 2000 metre lake.

I’d been warned that the length of the lake would surprise me, but it still surprised me. As our host put it: “Sitting at the far end pointed this way, it feels like you can see the curve of the earth.”

When we arrived, Shaun was talking to some lunatic who had clearly forgotten his kayak and had come out for a paddle around in a hollowed out pencil. As we approached, the lunatic paddled off at a remarkable speed for a man kneeling on one knee in half an HB.

Introductions completed, I asked Shaun what the lunatic was playing at. “That was a C1 – I imagine you’ll have to do that one too at some point, won’t you? Probably not today though.” Probably not, no.

It's a bit like trying to swing two golf clubs at the same time.

It all started promisingly. Shaun took us inside to a very ingenious canoeing machine to run me through some basic techniques. I paid very close attention and tried as hard as I could to do what he was telling me – cock the wrist this way, point the elbow that way, reach to the front of the stroke with a straight arm. It seems funny now – by the time I got into the boat, it became fairly clear that I wasn’t going to be reaching for much other than a towel and a change of clothes before too long.

A ‘sprint’ kayak is designed to do just that - sprint - to go as fast as possible in a straight line. Unlike the kayak I paddled around Plettenberg Bay a month ago, which remained pretty stable despite a fifteen-foot Indian Ocean swell, the kayak Shaun put me in felt like it was going to struggle with the fifteen millimetre ripple being thrown up by the cold Nottingham wind.

Having suggested I might be better to take my shoes off in case they got wet, Shaun took great care in telling me how to get into the boat. I followed his instructions to the letter and got in without a problem. Once there, I listened just as carefully to him telling me how to get out again, but I knew I wouldn’t need that information. My only question about the whole process maybe gave away just how confident I was feeling, “Is the water deep?” His answer wasn’t quite what I was looking for… “It’s deep enough.”

Deep enough for what? To drown? To avoid hitting my head on the bottom if I went belly up? To contain flesh-eating animals?

I set off bearing the grimace of a man in trouble. The slightest shift in weight makes the boat wobble. “Just let it wobble. Never let go of your paddle,” Shaun shouted from the bank (not that I’d progressed far enough out for him to need to shout) “Don’t fight it or you’ll get wet.”

Cock the wrist this way, point the elbow that way, reach to the front of the stroke with a straight arm.

I was already getting wet. The shape of the racing blade may be scientifically precise in terms of gaining that vital extra second, but it is also quite conducive to scooping water all over your lap when you’re paddling at 0.62 mph.

Somehow I made it 40 metres to another jetty where I was met by the increasingly amused Shaun and the constantly amusing Tim. “That wasn’t too bad – you made it further than I thought you would.” Shaun confided gently, encouraging me. “1000 metres is going to take you about a week at that speed, mate.” Tim quipped from behind the camera.

I turned the boat around and headed back in the direction from which I had come. I was starting to get the hang of it a little. It felt like it was wobbling less. Tim later likened it to trying to ride a bicycle very slowly – it’s actually easier to keep it balanced if you’re going a bit faster. Perhaps I was thinking the same thing when I decided to dig my next stroke in a bit deeper and build up some speed.

You don't get great whites in Nottingham, do you?

I cocked my wrist this way, I pointed my elbow that way, I reached to the front of the stroke with a straight arm, and then I fell in. The boat wobbled and I fought it (mistake number one), and then I let go of the paddle (mistake number two) in order to cling to the side of the boat (mistake number three), and that was all she wrote. I’d call it a capsize, but it wasn’t even worthy of the name. It was like a rat deserting a sinking ship.

Like a lady swimming with a new perm - my hat stayed almost dry.

Shaun was right - it was indeed "deep enough"

The water was incredibly cold and by the time I’d swum the twenty metres back to the jetty I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes anymore. Shaun looked me up and down and asked me if I wanted to have another go or to go and have a shower. It was all I could do to stop my teeth chattering long enough to take the second option.

All ashore that's going ashore!

Tim reassured me the whole way to the changing rooms that really it was a great success – he’d got the whole thing on film and my shoes were still dry. All I could think was that the next day I was going to have to do it again, only then I was going to have to do it through a raging torrent rather than on a millpond.

Despite the cold and the humiliation, I still found it quite amusing.

* * *

I'll save the write up of Sunday's exploits for tomorrow night - I'm still exhausted from the weekend, so if I'm going to get back to my triathlon training in the morning, I'm going to need to go to bed about half an hour ago.

Canoeing Update

2005-04-17T21:22:00.000+01:00

Coming back down the M1 on the way home this afternoon, I saw sign after sign telling me that 'tiredness kills'. In light of that terrifying fact, I'm going to keep this brief and head to bed before I expire.

Canoeing is hard - I'll tell you how hard in the next few days when I regain enough strength to type a proper post and stop tasting the nastier elements of the River Trent every time I swallow.

In the meantime, check out the cause's latest bit of publicity (thanks Phil!).

Can You Canoe?

2005-04-14T20:15:00.000+01:00

Action Man - anatomically incorrect in almost every respect, with the possible exception of his facial expression whilst at the helm of a kayak.

The first thing you should know is that kayaking and canoeing are essentially the same thing – that is to say, all kayaking is canoeing – but not all canoeing is kayaking. The second thing you should know is that this isn’t as hard to grasp as I’m making it sound.

There are two types of canoeing race – flatwater (or sprint) and slalom. In an Olympic games, the sprints take place on the same stretch of water that the rowers use (although not at the same time), while the slalom is run through 25 gates on a specially constructed white water course.

There are also two types of canoe – the Canadian and the kayak. The Canadian is paddled from a kneeling position with a single-bladed paddle. The kayak is paddled from a seated position with a double-bladed paddle.

See? Simple.

Well… simple to understand anyway – simple to watch on TV even. However, I’m reliably informed that ‘simple’ isn’t a word I’ll be using much to describe the actual experience of having a go. This weekend I’m heading to Nottingham to the National Watersports Centre to be put through my canoeing paces by a former Olympian, who is now a coach with the Great Britain team. His first question was “Can you swim?” and his answer when I asked him what I should wear was more or less “Something you don’t mind getting wet.”

The BBC website has an interesting brief history of canoeing if you’re keen to know more about where this sport came from. The essential Olympic facts are:

Flatwater racing became a display sport in the games of 1924, and was included as a full Olympic sport for the first time in Berlin in 1936 for men and London in 1948 for women.

Slalom made its debut in Munich in 1972, but did not appear again until Barcelona in 1992 (where my mentor for this weekend finished 17th – he then finished 9th in Atlanta four years later).

It should be an interesting weekend – BBC Nottingham have threatened to send a radio crew down to laugh at my efforts, and I’m hoping to convince the Nottingham Evening Post that there may be an opportunity to get some exclusive shots of a drowning canoe novice. I shall, of course, report back on Monday.

In the meantime, to keep you amused, check out Statue John’s brilliant Internet find – it’s a tailor made training video for the freestyle urban athlete!

Ultimate Gym Membership

2005-04-06T18:11:00.001+01:00

The pool is heated to 27 degrees - slightly lower than a normal leisure pool. Hopefully, it will contain less toddler wee too.

After many threats (all of which turned out to be largely hollow) I have finally joined a gym. The good people at the Oxford University Sports Centre are the lucky blighters who will have the pleasure of my huffing, puffing, heavily sweating presence in the coming months as I train for the various events I need to complete.

The facilities are ideal for my needs – in addition to the standard things you’d expect to find at a gym (pool, power-lifting room, running, cycling, rowing machines, tennis courts, squash courts) they also have an athletics track - or, as I like to think of it, the athletics track.

Almost 51 years ago, on a cold and breezy May evening, Sir Roger Bannister (just plain Roger in those days) hurled himself round the Iffley Road track four times (a mile) in less than four minutes, thereby becoming the first human being ever to do so – or, the first human being to do so in the presence of a stopwatch-wielding Norris McWhirter at any rate.

Bannister has an enormous nose and skinny legs - maybe I've found my milieu.

I haven’t yet ventured out onto the track to run, but when I do for the first time I will be running four laps to see what all the fuss is about.

Sea Kayaking in South Africa

2005-03-19T11:35:00.000Z

I contemplated getting down on my hands and knees and kissing the beach.

In the heart of South Africa’s Garden Route lies Plettenberg Bay. By the beach, there is a shop that serves as a headquarters for a company called Ocean Blue. They run all manner of adventure tours - skydiving, shark, dolphin and whale safaris - and they also offer a novice the chance to have a go in a kayak.

In a few weeks, I’m heading to Nottingham to get shown the ropes in a racing kayak; until I go, I can only guess that the main difference between a racing kayak and one designed for a life on the ocean wave is that while the former is designed to go a fast as possible on a flat surface, the design of the latter places a higher priority on not going to the bottom of the ocean at a similar pace.

I got out of bed at 6:45 this morning. A quick glance out the window confirmed that the weather was fine for kayaking. I shuffled to the shower, which probably sounds like a stupid place to head when you’re about to wade out into the Indian Ocean dragging a kayak behind you, but I had to do something to try and make myself feel better - that last visit to the whisky bottle at the end of the night is always the killer.

Showered (but still shuffling), I forced down some orange juice and a bowl of fruit on my way to the beach. The first thing I noticed when I got there was the height of the waves - from the hotel on the hill above the bay, the sea had looked like a millpond; down here in the thick of things, there was a bit more to contend with than I’d hoped for.

There were four boats in our group: one double and three singles. I was lucky to snag one of the singles. Our skipper, Gareth, talked us through the basics. Push with the top hand, don’t pull with the bottom hand; if a big wave comes, point the boat into it, never across it; if a shark comes closer to your boat than you’re comfortable with, just bang the hull with your paddle and it will go away.

“Shark?”

“What’s that, sorry?”

“You said shark.”

“Yeah, but only if we’re very lucky.”

Hoping to be very lucky in a slightly different way to Gareth, I dragged my boat down to the water’s edge. Gareth took the nose and led me out past where the waves were breaking onto the beach. I hopped in and he shoved me off with a vague instruction to wait for him by some buoys a few hundred yards out. I set off toward them, banging the hull with alternate strokes. Better to be safe than sorry.

We left the buoys as a group and paddled into the sun. My shoulders began to ache about ten minutes into the two-hour trip, but at least I didn’t feel sick. I was surprised at how quickly we escaped first the noise of the beach, and then the sight of it. At the beach, the breaking waves were maybe two or three feet high - a kilometre out to sea there was enough of a swell that I occasionally found myself unable to see anything other than water.

The alcohol from last night was making me tired, but at least I didn’t feel sick.

Gareth stopped every so often to talk to us about where we were and the things he’d seen before. One member of our group asked him about sharks - had he really ever had one come close to his boat? On the beach, talk of sharks had been slightly disconcerting; out here in the silently swaying vastness it felt almost foolhardy - like tempting fate. I hoped Gareth would tell us that he hadn’t ever encountered a shark out here. I hoped Gareth would say than none of the Ocean Blue skippers ever had. I hoped Gareth would tell us more about the dolphins.

“I had a great white sit on my tail and then beside me for about 40 metres once.” I was disappointed. I clung to the hope that maybe he was about to tell us a story about meeting Greg Norman, who had been in the area scuba diving. “I didn’t really know what to do. His dorsal fin was out of the water, and the water is so clear, I could see his pectoral fins perfectly.” Not Greg then. “He just sat there, keeping pace with me.”

The hull, man! Why didn’t you bang the hull?

“I couldn’t really bang the hull without missing a stroke and therefore slowing down, and I didn’t want to slow down in case he swam into me and then took a nibble to see what I was.” The others laughed. I think I might have whimpered.

Thank God it is the South African summer. I’ve seen the Discovery Channel, I know that sharks tend to prefer the cooler waters.

“We wouldn’t see one at this time of the year though, would we?” said someone that sounded a bit like me.

“There are certainly fewer of them around in the summer, but you still see them occasionally, but only if they let you see them. It’s not like in the movies - you don’t get the cello music to warn you! You’ll just turn around and he’ll be there.”

I resolved to at no point ‘turn around’ and to try and ignore the cello music that now filled my head.

“I feel so lucky to have seen one. It was a real thrill. A real privilege.”

Again I noted a difference in our interpretations of the word ‘lucky’ - I’d have felt lucky too - and I would have taken great pleasure in telling everyone I ever met all about the great white shark I had encountered, but I would have been telling them from the shore, because I wouldn’t have been getting back in the water.

Still, at least I wasn’t feeling sick.

I'm not sure I have the legs to pull off this look.

We repeated the scenario often - we’d paddle for a while, then we’d stop and Gareth would tell us about other animals he had encountered. His stories may have been ones he tells every time he goes out, but he told them well, and his passion and knowledge were, in equal measure, impressive and inspiring.

He told us how to tell the difference between the blows of various whales, and that what they’re blowing isn’t sea water, but condensation that builds up on the inside of their vast, warm lungs. He pointed out terns diving for fish. He explained the difference between a ground swell and a wind swell.

We were in a wind swell, which meant the swell was irregular, which was probably why I was feeling sick.

We paddled on. We had come a couple of kilometres out from the shore and then paddled parallel to it for about an hour before we started to loop back round, at first towards the beach, and then parallel again, but much closer in. I don’t know whether it was a coincidence or a scientific fact, but the swell was getting worse as we got closer to land. I was really feeling sick now, and I was falling behind.

I fantasised about someone appearing in a speedboat and asking if I wanted a lift. I daydreamt about Gareth signalling that it had gotten too rough and we ought to just head in a straight line back to the beach and carry the boats back. I wondered if sharks were attracted to the smell of whisky-laced vomit. I suspected not, but I used the possibility that they might be to stop myself chucking up for a good ten minutes.

As I reached my lowest ebb - my stomach churning, my arms aching and shaking from trying (and failing) to keep up with the group - I thought again about my Olympic challenge, about all the events I have to do, about the physical endurance required for so many of them, and about my seeming predisposition to want to quit just about everything I start.

I laughed ruefully at my previous notion that my impending trip to Nottingham might see me complete all eleven canoeing and kayaking disciplines in a weekend. At the rate I was going this morning, I’ll be doing well to cover one or two in those two days - assuming, that is, that I manage to reach a suitable level of basic proficiency to even have a go at any of them.

I stopped paddling and just bobbed around for a while as the others moved on. By now, they were probably a hundred yards ahead. I had a choice to make: I could either try and deposit my breakfast over the side and hope that made me feel better enough to paddle on, or I could signal to Gareth that I was really struggling and needed some help.

“Dolphin!” someone bellowed. I felt my heart jump. Perhaps my kind of luck (rather than Gareth’s) might be in. All illness and tiredness disappeared as I pounded the water with the paddle and used my feet to control the rudder.

And then, not quite as suddenly as you’d expect, there they were: a pod of four Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins. At this part of the beach, nearer the estuary, the waves were much bigger. The pod surfaced just behind the breakline several times, about twenty or thirty yards from where we watched.

Gareth talked to us about them as we sat there staring at them. They’re very rare - only 600 off this bit of coast - they can move from salt to fresh water without a problem and therefore like to feed near the estuary. Their Atlantic cousins have been known to chase fish into the nets of fishermen.

They weren’t leaping, but they did get high enough out of the water that I could see almost the whole animal. I was warned before I saw them that they were “beyond words” and it would seem that was right. It was a moment I’ll never forget.

Soon they disappeared (no doubt thrilled with their “human safari adventure”) and we resumed the long slog back to our starting point. I was encouraged by the fact that I had been able to pull myself together enough to get to the dolphins, and by the fact that we were now moving in roughly the same direction as the swell, so I put my head down and paddled on.

They say that a high percentage of car accidents happen within a few miles of the car owner’s home; I nearly established a similar proximity rule for kayaking as I neared the shore. I forgot one of Gareth’s rules and let the boat get sideways on to the vicious 36-inch waves. My dismount was slightly less elegant than I’d planned, but I was glad that I had waited to fall out until the water only came up to my knees.

Retrospective

2005-03-10T23:24:00.000Z

Look how weird their clothes were in 2004! And the hairstyles!

Inspired by a request from BBC Nottingham for some sporty photographs (they’re going to cover my trip to the National Water Sports Centre in April and want something to flesh out the story), I have spent most of this evening taking photographs of the TV. Before I got the hang of using Hello to post pictures on here, all I had was the trusty video recorder.

Having e-mailed the pictures to my contact in Nottingham, I thought it might be nice to lace them into their relevant entries. So take a trip down memory lane and revisit the badminton (singles, doubles and mixed doubles) and the table tennis (the failed attempt to play the singles, and the doubles).

I’m off to South Africa tomorrow. Big thanks to Phil from BBC Nottingham (who is officially the 17th best mini-golfer in Britain) for expressing an interest in what’s going on here and sending me off on my holidays with a big Olympian smile on my face.

Random Trivia

2005-03-09T17:00:00.000Z

Since I began my quest to complete all of the Olympic events, I have become an unashamed collector of any and all Olympic knowledge I stumble across. My most recent discovery (courtesy of www.sportsfilter.com) was this site, which has details of a new exhibition from the Smithsonian.

The Olympic sections make interesting reading, and so does the rest of the site if you’re a sports fan. The medal pictured above is a participation medal from the Games of 1896.

From the website:

All participants in the first modern Olympics received a bronze medal designed by Belgian sculptor Godefroid Devreese (1861–1940). First-place winners were awarded silver medals and olive wreaths, while the second-place finishers received copper medals and laurel crowns. At the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded for the first time.

The first modern Olympics attracted 250 male athletes from 14 nations who competed in 43 events. At the 2004 Athens Olympics, more than 10,500 men and women from 202 nations participated in 300 different events. While the original Games offered just nine sports, the 2004 Games featured more than 37 different competitive fields. Now staged every two years, alternating between Winter and Summer Games, the Olympics are the most anticipated international sporting event, viewed in person and on television by more than two billion spectators.

Stephen Martin had a few gems in his talk too:

There have been 25 Olympics in the modern era. In those games, Great Britain has fielded a total of 6247 athletes.

The smallest British team consisted of just two men in St Louis in 1904. Both of them came home with medals.

The largest British team consisted of 676 athletes (642 men and 34 women) in London in 1908. That team managed to win 141 medals between them.

Of the 6247 athletes to represent Great Britain at the Olympic games since 1896, just 19 came from Northern Ireland.

Holidays

2005-03-07T19:36:00.000Z

Holidays are wonderful things. The returning Ultimate Olympian enthusiast (or ‘mum’ as I like to call her) will surmise that I have been on holiday already, but in truth, I don’t leave for South Africa until Friday.

An impending holiday is good for the soul, but it can also be bad for the stress levels. Trying to cram most of March’s work into the few days of it that I have been or will be in the office has taken its toll – so much so that I’ve let the blogging slip somewhat and find myself now in dire need of… well, a holiday.

I don’t for a moment claim to have been tied to my desk since last I wrote here – far from it – but my mind when it wanders has been annoyingly wandering back to work instead of off at tangents about all things Olympic.

Dr Stephen Martin very kindly forwarded me the presentation he gave to the University of Ulster Alumni Association in February, but I haven’t the time to do a précis of it justice, so you’ll have to wait.

Having swum a couple of times and discovered that, while I can’t seem to do any other stroke to save my life, I am still handy enough at the breaststroke, I have since limped from one vaguely debilitating virus to another and haven’t been back to the pool.

Several hours of hard grafting research into triathlon training produced a schedule that should get me safely from one end of the race to the other in August – it begins in earnest the week after I return from South Africa, as does my membership of the (Oxford) university gym.

I have high hopes that I might be able to muscle in on a game of beach volleyball whilst in Cape Town, but have no other plans to do anything even bordering on the Olympic whilst there.

I hope to return refreshed, reinvigorated, revitalised, renewed, resolute… but, knowing me, I’ll probably just be red from too much time in the sun and therefore rendered reluctant to reveal my farmers tan in the swimming pool.

I may try to post from my travels, but than again, I may just not bother.

I have too many things going on to focus on anything properly, but like everything else at the moment, sorting that situation out is something I have assigned to the vague future period that is for now labelled “when I come back from holiday.”

Cricketing Scientists

2005-02-19T10:14:00.000Z

The Oxford University Plant Sciences Cricket Team prepare in earnest for the arrival this summer of the Bangladesh test side.

Cricket was included in the Paris Olympics of 1900 but never again graced the games. At the time, a French magazine observed that “cricket is… a sport which appears monotonous and without colour to the uninitiated.”

The editor of that rag had clearly never been to Oxford to witness the passionate and flamboyant play of the Plant Sciences team.

On the other hand, a British journalist reported, “We found the French temperament is too excitable to enjoy the game and no Frenchman can be persuaded to play more than once.”

In 1900, the cricket competition consisted of one match between Great Britain (represented by the Devon and Somerset Wanderers Cricket Club) and France (represented by staff from the British embassy in Paris). Great Britain won by 158 runs.

Although it is no longer an Olympic sport, I hope to play some more cricket in the coming years. I have been lucky enough on occasion to be invited to make up the numbers for the Plant Sciences team, and on Thursday night attended their AGM. It was a fun evening, and I probably drank more Kingfisher than any pseudo-Olympian ought to (even though it smelt like washing-up liquid).

Huge thanks to the team, not only for the invites to play last season and to attend the AGM, but also for the spontaneous whip-round that raised £60 for Sobell House – your donations are greatly appreciated and will do a lot of good.

Another Real Olympian

2005-02-18T16:31:00.000Z

You think you know how much work and money go into the organisation of a country’s Olympic team – you inhale sharply when it is mentioned to indicate that you’re well aware of how expensive and time consuming it all is – but until you sit in a room and have it explained to you by someone who really does know, you haven’t a clue.

On Wednesday night, the University of Ulster’s Alumni Association hosted an evening in London at which the current deputy chief executive of the British Olympic Association, Dr Stephen Martin, gave a talk on how he and his team had gone about laying plans for Athens, and what they had done on the odd occasion when those plans went aglay.

I shouldn’t have been there really. I had a run-in with the University of Ulster once, but it was hardly enough to be considered an alumni. It was thanks to UU that I became a professional golfer. Having finished an economics degree in Scotland, I was provisionally enrolled on a post-grad accountancy course at the Jordanstown campus of UU. On registration day, I sat in the queue with lots of other people who had somehow been duped into thinking they wanted to pursue a career in accountancy.

When I arrived, I was already less than convinced that I was doing the right thing – half an hour in the queue surrounded by the living dead and my mind was pretty much made up. I got up and walked to the front of the line and handed the woman my form.

"I don’t want to register," I mumbled. "Sorry" I added, as though the woman might in some way have taken it personally.

"But… if you don’t register, you can’t do the course." No flies on her.

I’d love to say that I walked out of the building with my head held high and drove home to embark on a training regime set to inspiring music that culminated in me winning the Open, but actually I slunk away like a criminal and drove home very slowly wondering how exactly I was going to explain myself to my parents.

As I headed from the frying pan back to the fire, it occurred to me that moments like those – truly defining moments when you decide to swim against the tide of what’s happening to you, or even climb out of the water altogether – don’t come along very often. At the time, that wasn’t much comfort, but looking back, I’m glad I did it. I would have been a terrible accountant.

Ultimately though, that queue for registration was as close as I got to having any claim to membership of the UU alumni association, but I have friends (or my dad has) in high places, so I blagged a couple of tickets.

Stephen Martin played hockey for the same club as I did when I was at school in Northern Ireland. He played for the firsts, so I made sure not to upstage him by relegating myself to the fourths. When he wasn’t busy playing for the mighty Holywood team, he also played for Great Britain, on the team that won a bronze medal in Los Angeles, a gold medal in Seoul (“Where were the Germans… but frankly, who cares?”), and finished 6th in Barcelona.

His talk was very informative and full of little gems of information, which he managed to convey very well despite the constant heckling of a disgruntled Londoner who didn't want the games to be hosted anywhere near her house. I e-mailed him today to see if I can access his presentation anywhere online. He replied very quickly to say that his PA would mail me a copy on CD. When I get it, I’ll post a précis.

The highlight of the evening for me came when he announced that he had two books to give away – a copy of the Team Handbook and a copy of the Official Olympic Report from Athens 2004 – to the first person to answer a couple of questions. The first question had been answered before I’d processed it and the Team Handbook was gone.

The second question was "Where will the next winter games be held?"

I knew the answer straight away (largely thanks to a T-shirt John van de Poll likes wearing), but, before I could open my mouth, the heckler struck up again and bellowed "Toronto!"

"No – Torino!" I smugly said, hand already out for the prize. It might be my imagination, but I’m fairly sure Stephen Martin was glad that I (and not the raging mouthpiece beside me) was taking the book home. It’s a great book. If you want a copy, you can buy one here.

Many thanks to Timo for coming along with me and to Stephen Martin for giving the talk and answering questions – yet another Olympic legend who seems to also be a thoroughly bloody nice chap!

Row, row, row your... rowing machine

2005-02-13T21:40:00.000Z

Another very much appreciated donation to the cause – a huge thank you to the Prices for the rowing machine. Although, I don’t know why I’m thanking you – this pain I’m feeling is largely your fault!

It has been a weekend of pain. Top-level athletes (like me) are notoriously difficult to live with, so my wife took herself off to London for the weekend to get some peace. I have therefore spent two days distracting myself (from the heartache induced by this abandonment) with exercise.

I’m really too tired to put my mind to writing anything sensible at the moment, but suffice it to say that this weekend, in addition to christening the rowing machine, I have been for a 6km run (which turned into a couple of runs either side of a walk), taken my bike in for a service, and, tonight, I have swum 60 lengths (1500m).

The latter is the reason I’m not really able to muster the strength to type at present. I had lots of fancy ways to express the sentiment stored up in my mind, but in the end it comes down to just one cold, hard fact: I’m a long way from being able to do a triathlon.

It's Not Quite a Walk in the Park

2005-02-09T19:27:00.000Z

I’m in the process of organising another event for the summer that might be more to the taste of the armchair fan. On Saturday 28th May, I will be doing the 50km walk along the Thames path from Lechlade back to Oxford. Thus far, about ten people have suggested they’d like to join me, and anyone else who fancies doing it is more than welcome to come along.

I anticipate covering the distance in about six and a half hours, but, for those of you with a gentler approach to life, there are plenty of good pubs along the way. In the coming weeks, I will be drawing up and posting out some sponsorship forms for those who want to take part. Drop me a mail if you want to join us.

Pale Rider

2005-02-08T19:59:00.000Z

Last night, I picked up my new bike from Neil Morrison. He did the London Triathlon last year, and has invested in a “proper bike” for this year’s race. The result is that I get to use the white stallion pictured above. I take it as a good omen that the bike originally belonged to Terry.

Neil proudly pointed out (and pumped up) the Michelin racing tyres he had fitted to the mighty beast; they look impossibly thin, like they won’t possibly keep the bike upright, but they do their job magnificently, even if the price is that you can feel every single bump. I made a mental note to avoid any form of slatted drain in the road.

Otherwise, it has no lights, the back brake doesn’t work very well and the front brake doesn’t work at all. In addition, I don’t yet own a helmet - so naturally I decided to cycle it home from Neil’s house in the dark anyway. Mostly I stuck to the pavement and didn’t cycle much faster than a brisk walking pace to avoid any trouble, but I did get one chance to crank it through the gears and see what it could do.

Holywell Street in Oxford is a dead-end for cars and, as such, is always pretty quiet. By the time I reached it on my way home last night I had familiarised myself with the controls (and the toe clips) and was beginning to get twitchy for some speed. The lights at the top of the street were green, so I slipped the bike into its strongest gear and stood up on the pedals.

I was stunned at how quickly I got from one end to the other. The road surface has recently been replaced, so the ride was almost silent once I sat back into the saddle. It was like flying! Fortunately, I resisted the urge to spread my arms and proclaim myself the “king of the world” but the sentiment wasn’t far off.

For a brief moment, I could see the appeal of the sport and that maybe, just maybe, all those hours of pain in the saddle might be worth the high to be gained from flying on tarmac. I was brought back down to earth (almost literally) when I reached for the front brake and discovered that it still wasn’t working, and then wrestled with the back brake, which only just managed to prevent me from making a more dramatic entrance onto Longwall Street than I had planned.

Despite my foolhardiness, I made it home in one piece, as did the bike. I’m looking forward to taking it out on the road in earnest once I’ve got myself a helmet and had the brakes fixed. I’m still a long way from completing the Olympic distance road race (259 kilometres – about 150 miles), but I’m a good bit closer than I was yesterday.

I'm also a lot closer to competing in a triathlon; my entry for the London Triathlon has been accepted. I have a starting place - whether or not I can convert that into a finishing place remains to be seen.

***

There have been several other new developments regarding Team Ultimate Olympian for the London Triathlon. Timo Kindred, who completed the event at his first attempt last year, has very kindly agreed to join the team and will be splitting his sponsorship between Sobell House and his usual charity, Hemihelp. We’re delighted to have you on board, Timo, even if you are still young enough to go in the 25-29 age group race.

Tim Sorrell (a.k.a. Swiss Toni) has officially entered the event and has also been busy trying to find out a) how we can go about setting up an online donations page that doesn’t involve someone like Just Giving taking a 5% slice of your generous donations (click on the 'terms and conditions' link at the bottom of the homepage), and b) if there’s a sprint triathlon somewhere convenient with an open-water swim that we can have a practice go at before the main event.

There has been some fighting talk from a pair of Simons – Bentley and Ferguson – both of whom have suggested that they might fancy doing the triathlon. Frankly, I think there’s about as much chance of either of them taking part as there is of me winning the whole thing, but I hope one or both of them may yet prove me wrong. They need to make their minds up pretty soon - entries close at the end of February.

I’m in the process of organising another event for the summer that might be more to the taste of the armchair fan. On Saturday 28th May, I will be doing the 50km walk along the Thames path from Lechlade back to Oxford. Thus far, about ten people have suggested they’d like to join me, and anyone else who fancies doing it is more than welcome to come along.

I anticipate covering the distance in about six and a half hours, but, for those of you with a gentler approach to life, there are plenty of good pubs along the way. In the coming weeks, I will be drawing up and posting out some sponsorship forms for those who want to take part. Drop me a mail if you want to join us.

A Real Olympian

2005-02-03T21:37:00.000Z

Ian Raspin - Canoe slalom legend and thoroughly bloody nice chap.

It’s all well and good for me to casually bandy about the word “Olympian” as though it in some way applies to me (when clearly it doesn’t, even slightly), but today I spoke to a real one: someone who participated in Barcelona in 1992 and again in Atlanta in 1996.

I’ve rubbed shoulders with the odd Olympian in my time. I’ve played hockey with Sean Kerly, Imran Sherwani, Stephen Martin and had a penalty stroke saved by Ian Taylor (they all came to the gala opening of a hockey club I used to play for).

I’ve fondled Sally Gunnell’s gold medal and asked her the kind of mind-numbingly dull and blindingly obvious questions that are now her stock and trade (“How did it feel to win the Olympic final?”… “Amazing!”… “Oh - you must have trained a lot.”… “Yes”).

When first I set about getting fitter to improve my golf many moons ago, I trained under the watchful eye and advice of Mary Peters at her gym in Northern Ireland. Only last year, I stood mere yards from some of the country’s top Olympians and Paralympians before gingerly holding more medals at lunch afterwards.

And yet, despite all this glamorous acclimatisation, and despite his very helpful, friendly and easy-going manner, it still felt strange to find myself having a phone conversation with Ian Raspin this afternoon.

In the Olympic canoe slalom, Ian finished 17th and 9th respectively in Barcelona and Atlanta. In 2000, he retired from competitive canoeing and took up coaching. From what I’ve read of him online and what I heard in his voice on the phone, he’s not a man to shirk a challenge, no matter how difficult it may be – which may go a long way to explaining why he has agreed to help me with the canoe and kayak slalom sections of my Olympic quest.

In assessing my existing capabilities, the first thing he wanted to know was whether or not I could swim. Encouraged that I could, he added “in fast moving water, upside down and wearing a helmet?” I’ll try anything once I suppose.

And so, thanks once again to Swiss Toni’s endless help, and in this instance his hospitality too, I hope to travel to Nottingham on 16th April to the National Water Sports Centre, to receive some coaching from an Olympic coach in an Olympic discipline.

It’s exciting, and it’s terrifying - apparently the odds against a complete novice completing the full 500 metres of a flat-water course in a Canadian canoe without falling in aren’t good, and the odds against that novice making it down an Olympic slalom course in one piece are verging on astronomical.

The Triathlon Squad

2005-02-03T21:23:00.000Z

Tim and Caitlin present me with come essential reading.

I think it is now safe to say that Team Ultimate Olympian for the London Triathlon in 2005 has increased in number by 100%. Swiss Toni has officially declared his intention to enter the event, bringing the number of us now doing it to raise money for Sobell House to… well… two.

The picture above was taken at my 30th birthday party last weekend - huge thanks to everyone who came, and especially to those who came bearing Olympic gifts and handfuls of sponsorship money for Sobell House. My mother, fuelled no doubt by her seemingly endless supply of cooking sherry, produced a fabulous collage of my sporting prowess. I’m not sure the picture below will be quite of a high enough standard to give you the full effect – at least, I hope it won’t – but I’ll post it anyway.

Nothing to see here... move along!

I have been somewhat lax in my training (for want of a better word) in January, but I’ve been inspired by the encouragement of my family and friends (not to mention the frightening thought of having to do an Olympic distance triathlon in a little over seven months) to get back at it with renewed vigour. I have a course of antibiotics to complete for an eye infection, but as soon as that’s done, I’m going to hit the swimming pool and running track with a vengeance.

Multitasking

2005-01-25T13:20:00.000Z

It’s been pointed out to me a number of times since I began this endeavour, that to get a truly substantial event under my belt early on would provide a boost for the rest of the campaign. To that end, I’ve all but decided to enter the London Triathlon this year. My wife and I went down to London last August to watch my sister-in-law (Vicky) and two good friends (Neil and Timo) compete.

No one knew Vicky had such a small head until her hair was tamed by a swimming cap.

It begins with a 1500 metre swim – that’s 60 lengths of your local pool – except you don’t get to do it in your local pool, you get to don a wetsuit and swim the guts of a mile in the Albert Dock. And you don’t get a lane to call your own – you get to swim in a mêlée that I will save a thousand words and show you a picture of.

I shall practice by swimming 60 lengths of the washing machine every night.

Assuming (and it’s a fairly heroic assumption) that you don’t die doing that, you get to climb out of the dock and then out of your wetsuit while you run to your bike.

Cycling in wet shorts is the sort of thing your mother probably would have warned you against, had she ever suspected that you would be stupid enough to do such a thing in the first place, but there is no time to stop and change or even towel down. Instead, you have to cycle 40km – which is nearly 25 miles – which is virtually a marathon.

Having done all that, you might think there would be some provision in the rules for a nice cup of tea and a bit of a sit down, but I’m reliably informed that it’s not until you park your bike in order to run 10km that things get really nasty. Your legs protest (quite legitimately I suspect) about the abandonment of a perfectly good bicycle in favour of a much less effective pair of running shoes.

I believe the guy on the right has just spotted Neil's chest-wig and is trying not to vomit.

In the London Triathlon, the run is made worse (yes, it can be worse) by being staged over two laps of a 5km course. That means being subjected to the cruel and unusual torture of being guided mere feet from the finish line a full 5000 metres before you are allowed to cross it.

Timo crosses the finish line and indicates that he would very much like a gin and tonic.

Watching the event last year, I wondered if any of the contestants were tempted to cut corners in the swim, or come running over the finish line with arms aloft after just one lap of the run. Then I discovered that each tri-athlete carries a chip somewhere about his or her person (the shoulder being the most popular spot presumably), which is registered as it passes through various checkpoints throughout the race, making it impossible to cheat by cutting corners.

I said that I have “all but decided” to enter. The only thing holding me back is the occasional foolish notion I have to actually think about what it entails doing. I don’t like deep water; in fact, I fear it, and this fear is worsened when it is murky deep water that has a hundred other people thrashing around in it beside me.

I quite like riding a bike – at least I did when last I owned one, when I was twelve – but I worry about the effects of cycling in wet shorts. I just can’t imagine a scenario in which that is going to work out well.

I have grown to not loathe running as much as I used to – but so far, I haven’t done more than my mile around the park at any one time, and I haven’t done that for weeks now. The prospect of doing that just over six times is enough on its own to make me pause for thought, but the prospect of doing it six times having just swum the equivalent of 60 lengths of shark-infested dock and virtually cycled a marathon is quite intimidating.

Neil is doing it again this year, and has recently taken possession of a new bike. His old one (which was, appropriately, originally Terry’s) is getting passed on to me, so at least I will have someone to train with and something to train on. I think I have almost managed to talk Swiss Toni into entering it too – at least, I take the fact that he did 60 lengths at the gym the other night as an encouraging sign that he's seriously thinking about it.

Entry costs £68 and closes in a few weeks. I’ll do a deal with you, my mighty readership - if someone can stump up the entry fee by way of sponsorship, I’ll enter without any more hesitation, repetition or trepidation. Having entered, I reserve the right to revert to being a neurotic wreck about it though.

By the time you've finished, only your mother would still be willing to do this.

Pull!

2005-01-15T13:19:00.000Z

Shotguns are heavier than you’d think, especially when they’re recoiling backwards into your shoulder. In cowboy films, they swing them around like they weigh about as much as the plastic ones kids play with, but a real one takes a fair bit of effort to hold aloft – even more so when you’re wearing eight layers of clothing, but you’re still shaking from the cold.

The clays seem to have shrunk somewhat since I found one in a field all those years ago. The official Olympic standard clay is 4.33 inches across – just a smidgen bigger than a golf hole – but when it’s flying away from you into the fog, it looks a lot smaller.

John van de Poll (who made his debut on another blog this week too) was my companion for today's event. We arrived and were pointed first in the direction of the ear plugs. Having poked those as far into our ears as we could, it was quite surprising that we managed to hear the lady in the tent call us back to give us a box of 25 cartridges each.

From there, it was off to the range, where we found some very keen and friendly shooters who were more than willing to show us the ropes. They hardly laughed at all to be fair. I suppose though, after a while, watching some novice completely miss the target becomes less and less funny.

Fortunately, there were two other novices with us who had also arrived early, and we got to watch them have a go before we took control (for want of a better word) ourselves. John went first. The format was ten singles and then doubles until you were out of ammunition – so, ten singles, seven doubles and a single for luck. John hit 5 out of 25 to lead what had suddenly to me truly become “the competition.”

I’ve mentioned before that my competitive nature has been known to overwhelm my enjoyment of sport at times. As I approached the novice shooting cage, I was trying very hard to tell myself that it didn’t matter how many I hit, but I knew that any less than six would leave me disgusted with myself.

Things didn’t get off to a great start. I missed a lot of clays before I realised that I wasn’t really looking down the barrel of the gun at all, but instead seemed to be looking roughly in the direction of the flying thing and hoping that would be enough. It wasn’t. The first time I really got my eye behind the barrel, I hit one.

Needless to say, I then figured I’d cracked it. I was so eager to get at the next one that I was halfway through yelling “Pull!” when the man who was overseeing the situation, a mentor of sorts, tapped me on the shoulder to very kindly remind me to take the safety off.

I hit a few more as we moved on to doubles, and my mentor was very encouraging, but in all honesty I was relying on him to tell me whether I was scoring or not. The recoil from the gun meant that I could never quite tell. The confusion arose from there. I was sure he told me at one point that I had hit five, and then I hit one of my final doubles.

I looked back at John and raised my fist in (only slightly) pretend celebration. “Six!” I yelled at him to allow for the earplugs. “No, five” said my mentor, “but if you hit this last single, you’ll be in the lead, look!” he added, showing me the score sheet. I looked as he pointed at John’s score and nodded as though I hadn’t been well aware of how many I needed to take the lead.

I could feel some tension creeping in (as tension is wont to do at moments like that) as I loaded the gun for my final shot – it was nothing excessive, but there was a slight tingle of that heady mix sport so often provides of hope, fear, expectation and desire. I shouldered the gun and shouted for a target. The miniscule black disk hurtled out into the fog and I unleashed the 12-bore fury right at it (or so I thought). I opened the gun, releasing the spent cartridge and, as casually as I could manage, turned back to my mentor.

“Bad luck, lad – just a bit low.”

The worst result in sport – a tie – still, it was a lot of fun, and I’m reliably informed (although still hard pushed to believe) that that’s what’s important.

Today was a nice introduction to the sport. I am hopeful that I should be able (with a lot of help) to have a go at the skeet variation some time, but, for now, I’m almost tempted to chalk this morning up as a valid case of “having a go at” the trap and the double trap. I appreciate that to some that might be akin to claiming after a light jog that I’d had a go at running a marathon, but I’m not so sure.

Partly, I admit, it would be nice to chalk up two more events, but I’m also not sure how much more missing 100 of 125 targets would further my understanding of how difficult a sport it is – and to shoot that many cartridges into thin air and cause that many clays to meet their end at the hand of a fallow field rather than some well-aimed lead seems inherently wasteful.

I have certainly now shifted from my previously held notion that it had to be easy because the guys on the TV made it look that way – it’s far from easy. It is hard to tell what your margin for error is, but I suspect that a good number of my shots missed the target by a long old way, which makes it even more impressive that sometimes the top people don't miss at all.

I’ll take a straw poll and decide it that way – leave me a comment and tell me what you think – have I done trap and double trap shooting to your satisfaction? Or am I a lazy, half-hearted idiot doing a half-assed job?

Many thanks to Dave Bathe and Dave New, and all the other people who were involved in organising the day - when we left, there must have been 30 people waiting in line to have a go, so here’s hoping they have raised lots of money for their church charity.

Thanks also to John, not only for providing the meaningful competition (trying to beat strangers always feels a bit hollow), but also for driving there and back, and donating £10 to Sobell House - £2 for each target I hit - although he had the decency to tell me that after I'd missed the other forty pounds-worth. It was a bad enough feeling to miss so many clays without also having to think that I was losing charity money as I was doing it.

Shooting the Breeze

2005-01-11T21:05:00.000Z

The tickets for this weekend’s shoot have arrived.

Shooting events have been in the Olympic programme since the first games of the modern era in Athens in 1896. Since then (when there were three shooting events for rifles and pistols), the number of shooting events has varied from 21 in 1920, to none at all in 1928. There are now 17 events in all – ten for men and seven for women.

The targets for the shotgun events have not always been made of clay. Traditionally, real pigeons were covered by the shooters’ hats before being released. In the Paris games of 1900, real birds were used. Shooters were eliminated if they missed twice. The winner killed 21 pigeons in a contest that claimed the life of more than three hundred in total. When using live targets was made illegal, glass balls (which were often filled with feathers) were used instead, until someone came up with the bright idea of using clay.

I remember finding one in a field once when I was a child; I didn’t know what it was. It was black and roughly glazed on one side, but it felt pretty solid, like bakelite rather than clay. To me, it looked like a particularly useless piece of kitchenware. It was too shallow and small to make a decent bowl, but too deep to be a side plate. I finally worked out what it was (with a little help), but even once I knew, I was mildly surprised (and very disappointed) when I dropped it and it smashed into a thousand pieces at my feet.

Of the ten men’s shooting events in the current Olympic programme, three involve using a shotgun to shoot at clay targets:

Trap - Three traps set at different angles and stationed at different heights are used. At the shooter’s command, a clay target is fired from one of the traps (the shooter doesn’t know which one until the clay is airborne) and he has two shots with which to try and hit it before it lands.

Double Trap - Same set-up as above, except two targets are released at the same time and the shooter only has one shot at each.

Skeet - Two take-off points are set up at different heights and at opposite sides of the range. The shooter moves between several shooting stations, which are arranged in a semi circle between the traps. The traps fire single or double targets – the single target can come from either trap, and the double target consists of one clay from each trap - the shooter is allowed just one shot at each target.

To sum up – you shout, “pull” and then shoot the next moving thing that crosses your field of vision. I’ve only tried this once, quite a long time ago, but it was fun then and I expect it will be again.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t imagine that Saturday’s excursion will afford an opportunity to complete an Olympic event (both the trap and skeet events consist of 125 targets being thrown, while 150 are released in the double trap event) but hopefully I will be able to befriend some kind soul who will be willing to donate that much time, effort and equipment to the cause at some point in the future - I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that 400 clays and 400 cartridges (not to mention the use of a gun and facilities for as much time as it would take to get the job done) won’t come cheap.

- - -

Completely unrelated to shooting, but an excellent piece of Olympic trivia I spotted this week, courtesy of Simon Barnes and The Times – if Michael Phelps were a country, he would have finished 16th in the medal table in Athens.

Record Breakers

2005-01-09T22:52:00.000Z

John called round yesterday to scan some photos for his new blogging adventure, and he brought with him a rather exciting book. This massive tome contains no less than a listing of the top eight finishers in every summer Olympic event since 1896, along with their times or scores, and over fifteen hundred stories and descriptions of pivotal moments from Olympic history, not to mention the official Olympic rules for each event. I've a feeling it might be worth me shelling out the £16.99 it would take to get myself a copy.

The book has also inspired a rather amusing notion - John reckons (and I agree) that we should be able to find an Olympic (or world) record from the past that we can beat in there. At first glance, the 1896 Olympic long jump record of 6.35 metres looks realistic – John reckons he was jumping over 4 metres when he was a nipper at school sports days – but I will be studying the book at great length to see if there’s anything better.

I expect the 1896 (72 years pre-Fosbry) high jump record of 1.81 metres might be in range too, especially as I am (according to some) a “big lanky streak” - but then, I also remember how bad I was at the "jumping-backwards-into-the-swimming-pool" game the last time I tried it, so maybe not.

This coming week will also see the resumption of actual events partaken of – on Saturday, I’m going clay pigeon shooting with John’s housemate, John (yes, it does get confusing). We have entered the novice section of a church charity shoot down near Swindon. It only cost a tenner to enter so I fancy it might provide more of a chance to meet some people who can help in the future rather than a chance to actually complete one or more of the shooting events.

Either way, I’m looking forward to it. I’ve tried it once and was told that I was good at it; but then the man who was telling me was the owner of the range and was clearly keen to get some repeat business, so I’ll take that assessment of my talents with a large pinch of salt.

In other news, many thanks to Michael Smith for becoming the first person I don’t actually know to request an Ultimate Olympian Live Wrong wrist band in exchange for making a donation to Sobell House. It’s in the post, Michael – I trust that your cheque, which will make a big difference, is too. Anyone else who wants one: just drop me a mail at ultimateolympian@yahoo.co.uk, tell me where you live and how much you want to donate and you shall have one before you can say “Oh look, here comes the postman!”