Life is so much simpler away from home. All your belongings are in a box and a bag and none of your mail reaches you. Back home there’s a tonne of mail to sort out and suddenly I have “stuff” knocking about all over the place. It’s mere presence makes me want to find something. It has been good to be back. The flight wasn’t too stressful and I managed to make it home before my nephews went to school. That was really nice.

There was all the usual sorting through mail and getting my life back in order. Being away 4 months certainly allows a few things to back up though it does feel good to get it sorted out.

Been getting some great advice and thoughts on my performance. Given me a lot to think about. I’ve managed to work out how to fix it! Just change my tri bar set up ! Only kidding. I have changed it though. I’d been planning on getting some drops with flat tops and was going to go with Ovals bars but given what happened with them again I’m a bit nervous to do that. I think their design is great but I won’t go back to it unless I feel reassured they won’t snap. Instead I’ve gone for 3T bars. They are superb. So comfortable. I’ve switched to a longer stem which has provided a more comfortable position when on the hoods or drops as I’m not so cramped but it’s also allowed me to leave the position when on the tri bars the same. The top picture shows it with the tri bars mounted without pads. This makes it great for road riding but with the gel inserts on the top of the bar allows TTing though probably not comfortable enough for racing. I will use this setup for periods when I’m training on this bike exclusively. The two pictures right show the set up I’ve going to race with at Lanza – this uses my old oval extensions and pads. Will play with it a bit to get the pads in the right position. Very pleased with it.

Been slowly getting back in to training. Couple of social rides over the weekend. Monday I ran to and from the squad swim and felt good. During the swim I was cruising 400s pull in just under 5:25 which felt great.

I’ve certainly got thoughts about how I will approach Ironman Lanzarote and I’m seriously considering forking out for SRM Cranks and possibly a GPS / HRM watch so I can race with both and get data on what I’ve done during the race. This is quite a change for me.

I think what’s happening here is I’m finally becoming more bothered about my performance. I was bothered before but only to the extent that I wanted to perform ok. For me enjoying training was far more important and as long as I got decent results I was happy. Now though I’m starting to feel I’d really like to see what my absolute best performance can be. Given the level of training I’m willing and able to do I reckon I’ve not done a performance in recent years commensurate with the training I’ve put in. I’d like to correct that. I’d like to absolutely nail at least one Ironman.

The million dollar question is how do I achieve that…