There has been a serious amount of rain here today. So much rain we knocked the planned ride on the head. We managed to swim the full course (2 laps) this morning. Pissing with rain and windy … didn’t notice the rain but the chop was bad and swimming back towards the finish was tough. The water was nice and it was certainly nicer in than out.

Next, find a decent diner for breakfast. It was quite a drive taking us 15 miles out of town before finding a great place about 2 miles from our hotel ! This wasn’t as mad as it sounded – we had the bikes in the car, the hope being to find a nice diner out of town and have breakfast whilst the weather decided to improve. It didn’t – wet all day. Enjoyed a well paced run at the end of the afternoon. Quite encouraging. For part of it I ran past a massive student band practising – very impressive.

Tonight met up with a load of friends of Andreas for some dinner. Really nice bunch and good fun to chat with some new people. They all tucked in to pizza whilst Jo and I stuck to salad which inevitably lead to questions about not eating carbs which are always so difficult to field in those circumstances.

Given the weather today we’re both pleased we rode the course yesterday. It is tough – very rolling. I used my full range of gears – from pedalling full pelt in my top gear through to out of the saddle grinding my lowest gear. This is a course that you could easily blow up on by hammering it early on. I think patience will be key here. The course is beautiful – through lovely rolling farmland and passing by picture perfect farms. Fingers crossed for nice weather so we can really enjoy it. We popped into a bike shop halfway round and the mechanic kindly fixed a niggle with my bike. We chatted for ages. He was the spitting image of my friend Mark – to the point I considered asking if he had a brother. I didn’t.

Our hotel has two big parties in it. The first being a Hanes Ironman Tour group of god knows how many germans. There are also loads of other triathletes here. There is also a weight watchers group ! How do I know this – there’s this notice board in reception giving details of meetings for each group. Anyway, it’s lead to an interesting game we can play – when in the lift and someone else gets in it’s guess which group they belong to. It’s not a very difficult game.