Hopefully everyone had a good Christmas! We have spent it with Jill’s parents, who I like to call the outlaws! We will travelling to Newcastle for part two of Xmas and New Year to see my family later this week.

Apart from a DVD and some chocolate, not to be eaten in moderation whatsoever, I was lucky enough to receive some interesting and useful pressies from Santa including: –

Flashing suitcase tags for when we travel to races
A multi tool to fix everything ever invented
A magnetic bowl to keep all the nuts and bolts in that I usually lose on the garage floor (forever!)
A set of digital luggage scales (hmmm, wonder what else I could weigh with them?…

However the biggest surprise came when I found out that Jill has booked me a Segway experience day! If you are wondering what a Segway is, it’s a two wheel form of electric powered transport you steer by using your body weight. Whether I should be let loose on this futuristic type of thingy, who knows? Still it will be on a motor racing circuit, plenty of room! Should be fun, I think.

I usually try to take the chance at Christmas of doing some extra training. Unfortunately I went into the festive period with a chest infection and a course of antibiotics following a nasty cold. Luckily it cleared up enough for me to do a gentle hour of indoor cycling on Christmas eve and I have carried on ok from there. Christmas day saw a gentle 30 min off road run whilst on boxing day I cycled out to the CC Breckland 10 mile time trial. Including the ‘race’ which I took steadily given my recent health, I covered 40 miles. I scored 7th place against the clock even though I spent half the ride waving at small children and fellow competitors, some of whom were dressed as a christmas tree or other assorted fancy dress!

Today was a 3 hour ride with tandem partner Bobby De’ath, so another 50 miles covered there, which isn’t bad.

The rest of this week I will be back at work on Wednesday and Thursday so will get a little more cycling done when commuting, then I will no doubt do some running whilst in Newcastle as my dad is pretty keen and does lots of coaching. I think we might even have a go at the local Parkrun which should be fun!

After this it will back down to serious training ahead of the new season.

Iain