In the meantime to keep this place from stagnating too much I thought I’d answer one of the most regular questions that seems to direct ppl here, mainly ‘Does Nettle Warrior come with a free t-shirt?’. To which the answer is a resounding ‘No!’. It does come with a free medal though, well if you finish, which is possibly the heaviest, shiniest, one you’ll ever receive. Ok, it’s actually a horse brass but that’s not a bad thing.

The other thing that has amused greatly today is that people have reached this page by searching for the following terms over the past two days.

Not sure if that is request for Sean or a review.

It has moved and can now be found at http://www.toughgaffs.com

Posting has been limited by Sean’s lack of a computer and my lack of exercise on part due to a manky chest infection. However, manky chest infection is clearing just in time for me to go play in the snow for a week. There’s also a pool and gym with the apartment so the plan is to try to get some exercise other than skiing in. Time will tell if the apres-ski is more of a priority.

Getting to the race start was simple enough and we had plenty of time before our scheduled 10.10 start to plan our route, Somehow though the time slipped away.  Fi took against her bike, which is made from the same depleted star material that Sean’s previous bike was and decided to rent one for the day, so leaving Sean to plot, Fi and I hit the bike shop. Then the hire shop. Then the newsagents for Mars Bars. Then to the bike shop for tyreweld and a new bladder for a Camelbak. Then another trip to the bike shop to try and locate a misplaced helmet (mine) and then finally a dash to the hire shop where I had actually left my helmet. We made it to the start with about thirty seconds to spare and set off.

The format for the race is simple. Each team is given a tag that they must use to check-in at various points, for this particular race you must start and finish on bikes with a running stage sandwiched between. You can do as many check points on bike or foot as you like, but you must do a minimum of one on foot and one on bike. If you hit a bike point on foot, or vice versa, you get penalised. You have five hours to do as many stages as possible and again get penalised for getting back late.Basically it’s orienteering with some mountain biking thrown in. Simples.

To make it slightly easier, you get your race pack with map well before you start so that you can plan  your route in advance. It’s made trickier as when  you start you get a piece of paper telling you what the points value of each check point is worth and which points don’t actually exist. I’m sure that if you’re taking this sort of thing seriously this would matter. As we’re just out for the run this didn’t matter too much for us. Though it was a tad annoying when Sean took us to a point that didn’t exist.

We set off keenly on the bikes, heading down a bridle path, where I almost immediately ran into trouble. The last time we did this event, all the cycling was done on cinder paths and I foolishly thought that my hybrid commuting tyres would be fine. I was wrong. This time we were’ doing semi-serious off road and I spent a lot of time going sideways. Somehow, though I don’t know how, I didn’t fall off, though both Sean and Fi did. Once we got off away from the mud and onto harder cycle tracks we picked up speed and managed to do about eight or so check points in two hours before transitioning to foot.

The running bit went fairly well, we hit seven check points and would have done better if we’d actually ran. We mainly didn’t run because the rain in the week before the race had made the going rather soft under foot and we thought not getting a twisted ankle would be a very good idea.  With about 50 minutes ago, we got back on the bikes, picked up three more check points and made it back with about eight minutes to spare. Even managing a jog to the finish.

All in all we cleared almost 400 points and ended up in 26th place, which is exactly where we came last time. Nice to see that we’ve improved so much. The best news is that no-one broke anything, my idiotic knee didn’t kick in and Fi will have a new bike made of fairy spit and angel hairs by the time we do anything similar.

As true athletes we immediately embarked on a post-mortem, back down the Forester’s, and decided that chunky tyres all round would be needed for the next duel event, and that chunky footwear might also be the way forward. Although how much that will help in ankle deep mud remains to be seen. Another vital lesson was don’t buy congenial stranger’s a pint and then expect them not to want to reciprocate, particularly if they are Irish.

All in all we ran about four miles and cycled about 17. Actually we cycled more like 20 after trips to and from the pub post-race are included. If I include my various trips to and from the shops I can probably add on another couple. Most of it was off road and it was mainly bloody knackering.

Fun though.

Team Iceds is about to converge for their first event of the year, the Queststar Duo in the New Forest. The forecast is for rain – hurrah! It’s also been raining every day this week, this means the lovely cinder paths will do two things. One throw up pale yellow gunk in an amusing fashion up the back of shorts and shirts. Two, get into the brakes and grind them away to nothing.

I’ll be booking the bike in for a service on Monday then.

As we’re camping, in March, the ability to update will be limited. Highlights of the day will no doubt be tweeted by me, (@kerrymg) if you’re desperate to know how we’re doing, how early the domestic started, how badly lost we get and whose fault it is, or isn’t. Or wait til the next post.. There may even be photos.

Now, college is over for a few weeks and I’ve only trained for two days out of the past five, with today only being a cycle to and from work. Tomorrow I’ve got an early start and quite likely a late finish. There’s also a fair bit of socialising to catch up on, which then impacts on ability to train in the morning.

The good news is that Friday, Saturday and Sunday will definitely be devoted to training. Team Gaffs, or Iceds as Sean seems to prefer, is off to the New Forest to take part in a Questar Race, which mainly involves running and cycling for five hours.

Hopefully this year it will not involve a compass that thinks North is every direction which will then  lead to a small domestic about how to map read. I also hope that this year I don’t fall off my bike and that we make it back within the five hour limit.

Next week we have the Questars event and the route of this blog is to encourage ourselves to train for the Tough Guy race in July….So I am guessing you will read about our walk here, sometime nearer October But we have said it will happen now and happen it will. Hadrian’s Wall, 84 miles, 4 days, simples.

Kerry has just mentioned that in a world of infinite possibilities anything is possible.  As we are now watching the rugby I take it that she is looking for the improbable chances of the right teams winning with a big enough spread of points and more improbable chance of England not looking like a gang of buffoons before France….and I think I know where England are going wrong and how it can be put right at long last.

England Rugby has being going badly wrong for so many years now because of Powerade, the official sports drink of the RFU.

So often pundits shout that we need to get back to basics on the pitch, but insist we use the latest in training and nutritional techniques.

Well I think training and nutrition should go back to basics too. Instead of hugs and cuddles and gently trying to coach and motivate your team to perform and leaving motivational notes under their pillows telling them how great they are, we should in fact go back to the carrot and stick method of motivation.  This method  being, ” YOU ARE NOT PERFORMING AS REQUIRED! I AM NOW GOING TO PUSH THIS CARROT INTO ONE OF YOUR ORIFICES AND BEAT YOU WITH THE STICK UNTIL YOU STOP PRODUCING SHITTY RESULTS” If you want to see just how effective this method is just look at what a few Egyptians managed to have built with an over-whelming number of slaves and a few sturdy whips!

Right now on to food and nutrition, Carbs, proteins, complex lipid fat? My arse! Get rid of it all! people telling you optimise your performance by eating the right thing at the right time. Which brings me to thisgit NOTE he states that he began working with the England squad in 2003 (our last good year as I recall) coincidence? Maybe? Then again maybe not.

So by following a strict scientific nutritional plan this man and others like him have turned a world cup winning side into a team who looked less than convincing against Italy and Jockland in this present tournament.

However if you go back to food basics and issue on a daily basis a pound of bread, with tea, cocoa and sugar to drink, as well as a fairly generous gallon (eight pints) of beer, seven days a week. and add to that a pound pork or beef, dried and salted to preserve them – and dried peas, dished out by the half-pint, every other day. the net result is England 1 France and Spain Nil.. dominance of the high seas and the continuance of the English Empire.

Right if you look at both of these web sites and you are observant you will notice that Tea is only mentioned in one of them. Tea obviously being the beverage of choice if you want to do something physically taxing.. I.E.Set up and control the worlds greatest Empire.

The RFU on the other has selected Powerade.  I think the comparison between the two and the results thereof do not need mentioning.

Also at no stage did Douglas Adams mention Powerade, He did mention a nice hot cup of tea and if Englandweere to start drinking tea instead of powerade then the improbable would be highly probable and Kerry’s wish for a desired sequence of rugby result would be met.

“The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits ofaBambleweeny 57 sub-meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood – and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance withthe Theory of Indeterminacy.”

Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

If you look very closely at this picture, at the bottom of the path is a blur of neon yellow. That is Sean at the bottom of the hill we just ran up and down a dozen times. For those of you that haven’t met Sean in real life, he’s quite a tall person. It has been noted by several people that he’s generally a large sized example of a human, I tell you this to point out just how bloody steep that hill is.Unfortunately the slalom stage is even steeper and further – yay!

So today was a trot of about 1.6 miles down down to the park, then 12 runs up the hill. The first person, in this case Sean, ran up the hill and dropped a dog lead. The second person, yours truly, then ran to the lead and picked it up. Then running either further or dropping it a bit nearer the bottom on the return journey. We mixed it up, some longer runs, some short and faster, for a very relative definition of faster. We then walked  the 1.6 miles back and are currently watching the pre-match punditry for Super Saturday.

Later today will come a very important part of the training, an event such as Tough Guy requires an holistic approach. This is why we’re mixing up running, hill work, core improvement and other aerobic exercise. The other element is training for the beers will drink once we complete the course, today will be an intensive session to help prepare for just that.

Edited to add crop of zoomed in image as Sean didn’t believe he was actually in it. The doggie happily running up the hill is Harley.

However, having read Sean’s most recent post about his total lack of exercise during his week in Cornwall. I’m feeling quite relaxed, or at least not guilty.

So I’m currently at the Gaffney’ country house in deepest darkest Somerset and the main plan is to watch the rugby tomorrow. The plan before that is to get up, have a light brekkie and then go do hill training. Then have a hobbitish second breakfast and then watch (please dear god) Italy stuff Wales, Scotland stuff Ireland and England stuff France*.

In a world of infinite possibilities, some of these things are bound to happen. I fear the only one that will actually  happen is the world of hurt that the hill involves.