My Biggest Challenge: Swimming and Cycling

For me, my biggest challenge is swimming. I'm a pretty good breaststrokeer, but the problem with that is breaststroke is a leg stroke, and I could easily swim 1900 meters in one session. In fact, on holiday last summer, I swam two miles breaststroke, but when it comes to triathlons, you need to be able to get out of the water quickly, and your legs are shot from the swimming. To overcome this, I've been going to the Chichester Triathlon Club, where they have fantastic swim coaches, including Matt. He's been working on my swim technique to make me as efficient as possible. The key is technique, and I'm making good progress.

One of the areas I'm still struggling with is my front crawl. My front crawl is very inefficient, and I've noticed that when my right hand comes across, it's not very effective at all. To overcome this, I've been working on it in a big way, but it's also important for me to be able to get through the swimming portion of the triathlon as efficiently and quickly as possible.

To improve my swimming, I need to focus on building my endurance and increasing my speed. This will not only make me more efficient in the water but also give me the energy reserves I need for the other two disciplines. With my swim technique improving, I'm starting to feel more confident in the water, and I know that with continued practice and dedication, I'll be able to tackle any swimming challenge that comes my way.

On the cycling front, I've been working on increasing my power output. To do this, I've invested in a smart trainer and connected it to my bike computer. I'm spending a lot of time on the trainer, using Zwift's online training platform to simulate rides and push myself to new limits. The big thing for me is measuring my power output so that I can avoid burning out during the ride. I want to be able to maintain a consistent pace without reaching too far into my energy reserves.

One of the biggest challenges I'm facing on the bike is increasing my power output while decreasing my body weight. This will give me more watts per kilogram, which is essential for optimizing my performance on the bike. With this in mind, I'll be doing more intense training sessions and working on building my leg strength to support my pedaling power.

Finally, there's the running aspect of triathlon. To prepare for the run, I need to train my body to transition smoothly from cycling. This means incorporating short runs into my rides, gradually increasing the distance and intensity over time. I've been using this approach successfully on trails in my area, where I can build up my endurance and pace.

I'll be working with my trainers, James and Matt, to develop a comprehensive training plan that addresses all three disciplines. We'll focus on building my endurance, increasing my speed, and optimizing my power output on the bike. With their guidance, I'm confident that I'll be able to tackle Ironman Marbella with confidence.

My Triathlon Experience: Training for Ironman Marbella

I'm excited to share my training journey with you, from the early days of building my endurance to the final preparations before the big event. My goal is to complete Ironman Marbella in May, and I'll be sharing all the ups and downs of this experience with you.

The course looks stunning, with the swim taking place just off the coast of Puerto Venus, followed by a challenging bike ride through the mountains and countryside around Marbella. The run will take me along the beachfront, offering breathtaking views of the Mediterranean Sea. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to compete in this event, which promises to be an unforgettable experience.

I'll be sharing regular updates on my progress, from training sessions to nutrition planning and equipment reviews. If you're interested in following along, make sure to subscribe to my channel and follow me on social media. I'd love to hear your thoughts and advice, so please leave a comment below or reach out to me directly.

With hard work and dedication, I'm confident that I'll be able to complete Ironman Marbella and achieve my goal of becoming a triathlete. Stay tuned for the next installment of my training journey, where I'll share more about my progress and the lessons I've learned along the way.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys and welcome to petrol pet and welcome to a video that's very different this is the first in a series of videos that I want to do around a challenge I'm doing this year now I know I am a car Channel and many of you will be here for the cars so if that's you this might not be your video in which case it's very cool turn off now and I will see you on the next car related video but if you're interested in the little bit about what motivates me as a person and the type of things that I need in my diary to challenge me and get me out of bed in the morning then this video is for you thank you now before we get going just a quick think I am going to be documenting this challenge this series on YouTube but I'm not going to be doing too many videos on YouTube this is still a car channel so don't worry most of the stuff I'm going to post around this challenge will actually be on Instagram and Facebook and a little bit of Twitter so if you're not following me on those platforms please do because that's where I'm going to put a lot of the behind the scenes stuff and a lot of the interactivity so make sure you follow me on those so what's this all about then well as I said I am a car Channel and the vast bulk of my content is car related although I did do cycle Sunday which gave you a hint of my other past in life which is cycling this series of videos I wanted to just share my journey over the next five months with you some of you might be interested and some of you might not care at all and that's all good and I totally get that but I'm really becoming more and more passionate in you know I'm we're not getting any older I turned 50 last year and for me that was a big milestone and I want to make sure that I maintain my physical and mental well-being as best as possible I'm still mentally about 15 but turning 50 was a real thing for me and I want to make sure that I'm fit and healthy and able to do things now I've always been a fit and active person I've always enjoyed sport when I was a kid I played squash at quite a good level and then from squash I went into golf and I've played rugby and hockey and a few other other sports but my big sporting passion pre-youtube in the naughties was actually equestrianism so Tracy and I bought a horse at the beginning of the Northeast we've not been married very long and a hobby grew very quickly into an absolute passion and I ended up competing at Eventing so dressage show jumping and cross country and that for me was my life for pretty much seven eight years I was riding probably five or six times a week most weekends I was out competing and I absolutely loved my time doing Eventing um it may not be the the natural sport you link with me you know from from Cars to going to one horsepower and four leg drive but the adrenaline rush was second to none and for me it's still one of the most complex and difficult Sports I've ever tried to compete in unfortunately in about 2008 the horse that we had sustained a really nasty injury that meant it couldn't jump anymore and although we convalesced it through that injury so that it could do flat work my days competing in Eventing were over so in around about 2009 I I wanted some new challenge and I decided in my ultimate stupidity to run a marathon I'd never done any running before I couldn't run a bath and I just decided I really wanted to run a marathon I'd have a mate do it the year before so I just entered of the London Marathon and I did a four month training program and went from not running at all to competing in the London marathon and I targeted a sub four-hour time I ended up doing three hours 57 which I'm still to this day very very proud of in fact my medal is hanging on my office wall just above me and that for me was a fantastic process of not thinking you can't do something working really hard and training towards it and then doing it is a sense of achievement that I just cannot describe unless you've done it it's very difficult to describe the next year A friend of mine Darren who came on the NC 500 tour with me he'd entered a charity bike ride that was basically replicating the Tour de France route and we did the last five stages of the Tour de France route and I went out and bought myself a road bike and that was my first foray into Road cycling and I've been hooked ever since and we did that and that was an amazing five days of physical pain but amazing amazing uh feeling of success when we finished after that I did a number of longer rides and challenges I've cycled up monvon two three times I've done the Parry rube challenge I've done lots of big sportifs but in 2012 I turned 40 and decided to challenge myself with something else and combine my love of running and my love of cycling with my not so much love of swimming and I entered my first triathlon I entered the London Triathlon and and for me the process of of training for all three of those was very difficult very challenging but I had a huge sense of achievement when I finished the London Olympic distance triathlon unfortunately although I was a pretty fit at that point I then kind of tailed off YouTube comes along and work comes along I started my own company in 2012 and suddenly physical activity goes to one side and you end up working too much and very very quickly you can realize that you're putting on weight and you're getting out of shape and that is not good um so I ended up um going to see a personal trainer a guy called James Temple who will be in this series of videos and he kind of started to work on my fitness but he has a mantra you cannot out train a bad diet so at that point I started to realize how important nutrition is when you couple that with physical activity if you want really good physical health and I did a challenge with James over three months where I really focused on my nutrition really focused on my exercise and and strength workouts and so on and I actually lost over a stone and a half in three months and went from 20 body fat to under 13 body fat I'll put a picture up above I was a complete physical transformation but that taught me a lot and I thought great I've made it I got my six-pack fantastic guess what take your foot off the gas and it all comes back on again and by the beginning of last year when it was my 50th year I turned 50 last year a lot of my weight had come back on and I think that was coupled as well with doing YouTube you can you see yourself on screen and doing TVs even worse when I did vintage voltage you I could kind of see the weight in my face and and I started to get a bit stressed about about the fact that it was you know coming back again I wanted to be fitter so I decided over the summer to celebrate my 50th birthday year with a big big challenge So I entered my first half Ironman in May of this year I'm doing Iron Man Marbella 70.3 so it's a half Ironman so in order to help you understand what that is and what training I have ahead of me let me jump on my trainer my bike next to me and I'll tell you more about what a 70.3 Iron Man is and just what I've got ahead of myself okay now before we get going I don't want you to think that you can only get something out of this video series if you're going to do a half Iron Man because that's not the intention at all for me it's it's not about the the distance or the difficulty it's about challenging yourself you know it might be couch to 5K it might be walking around the block it might be anything you like a couple of years ago my sister my big sister said oh I could never do any of the challenges that you do and I said yeah you can and I challenge that year to run a 10K Fun Run and she didn't run at all and she was very badly unfit and no way could she run in her head at 10K by the end of the year we did the Great South Run 10 miles she ran the whole way absolutely smashed it changed her whole way of thinking about things so don't think you have to only watch this if you're gonna do a half Ironman it might be anything that is just a little bit beyond what you think you can do and then you do that and then you do something bigger and you do something bigger and then ultimately you end up inching a half Ironman you never know after this I might do a full lineman so what have I got ahead of myself well there's three disciplines swim by Run distances are swim 1900 meters or 1.2 miles then you jump on your bike and the bike is 90 kilometers which is 56 miles and then you go for a run and the run is 21.1 kilometers and the reason it's a weird distance is because it's half marathon 13.1 miles all one after another now in order to help me train for this I want to talk through each of the disciplines but I'm going to be working with two coaches two people James I've mentioned already he's going to be helping me with Strength and Fitness and Nutrition I see him as a personal trainer every week anyway and we're just going to adapt the program that we do together to work on leg strength lots of squats and just general strength but what I'm not going to do with James is any of the technique I'm going to do that with a guy called Matt Jolly who actually was my swim trainer and swim coach when I did the London triathlon so Matt is an endurance athlete he does like 100 mile endurance runs and double marathons and stuff like that and together um with him I've joined the Chichester Triathlon Club and I'm working with those guys to help me on my technique so the first biggest challenge for me is swimming I'm a pretty good breaststroker but the problem with that is breaststroke is a leg stroke and I could easily swim 1900 meters I over on holiday in the summer last year I swam two miles breaststroke but if you do that in a triathlon you come out the water get on your bike and your legs are shot and you need your legs for this for the running and the cycling so you need to be doing front crawl and my front crawl is very very inefficient so I've already been going to chitchester Triathlon Club they've got some fantastic swim coaches there Matt being one of them and they're working on my swim technique it is all about technique to make yourself as efficient as possible I'll put some video over as I'm talking uh this video by the way was shot probably about six weeks ago and I got this problem when my right hand is kind of coming across and that's not very efficient at all I'm working on that in a big way but the swimming for me I need to be able to get through that and do it as efficiently and as quickly as possible but hopefully the strength part is the bike and the Run bike next I'm on my bike now anybody watch cycle Sunday you're probably thinking where's the Bianchi well I will be doing the actual day the road ride on the Bianchi but I've got myself a smart trainer and I've connected my old specialized to my smart train I didn't want to smash up the drivetrain of the Bianchi on the smart trainer and I'm using zwift the online training platform and so far not used a smart trainer before but it's the ability to put you in a world of pain very quickly is fantastic so I'm spending a lot of time on the smart trainer and then as the weather improves I'll be doing more and more long rides and I'll be keeping you up to date of what I'm doing there the big thing for me here and I've never done it before in cycling is this measures my power so at the moment I'm doing 140 watts of power because I'm just reaching along um and I'm starting to learn to ride to power and I think that would be very important on the day and so that I can push myself to the ultimate without going too far I'm going into the red and blowing up basically so for me the big part in the road cycling part is increasing my power decreasing my body weight so I get as much watts per kilo as possible there's a lot of work to be done on the cycling and then the last thing is the Run now firstly you need to train your body to run off the bike so I'm doing that I'll go on a ride here inside and then I'll go for a quick run up the road just to get used to that but the running around here is very hilly I do a lot of running off-road on Trails I've got some beautiful Hills out the back of the house I go out with a dog at the moment sort of minimum I'd go out for is Maybe 10 kilometers six miles and I'll be increasing that length and also trying to increase my pace um over the next couple of months and then you just start to tie them all together I know individually I could probably do each of the elements now it's doing them one after another it's going to be super difficult so that's pretty much it really so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a do a video with my two trainers with James and Matt so you can see the kind of things that they're doing try and give you some basic tips on just general fitness and well-being and keeping an eye on that if you like and then we'll go through my journey Ironman Marbella is at the beginning of May so Tracy and I will be flying out there and doing that the course looks beautiful the swim is in the sea just off of the little Port of puta bonus uh the ride looks quite nice it goes up into the Mountains and the countryside around Puerto Venus and Marbella and then the run is along the coast up and down the top of the beach which looks beautiful sure would be beautiful by the time I fit it but I'd love to know what you think I know it's a bit different in terms of a video but keep an eye on my Instagram keep an eye on my Facebook and Twitter keeping all my progress anyway I'm gonna get my head down and do some more work on this then I might go out for a run anyway hope you enjoyed that if you did give me a thumbs up comments below are always welcome and if you haven't done so already please subscribe to Petra bed for plenty more content to come and I'll see you on the next film guys you take care drive safe all right foreignhey guys and welcome to petrol pet and welcome to a video that's very different this is the first in a series of videos that I want to do around a challenge I'm doing this year now I know I am a car Channel and many of you will be here for the cars so if that's you this might not be your video in which case it's very cool turn off now and I will see you on the next car related video but if you're interested in the little bit about what motivates me as a person and the type of things that I need in my diary to challenge me and get me out of bed in the morning then this video is for you thank you now before we get going just a quick think I am going to be documenting this challenge this series on YouTube but I'm not going to be doing too many videos on YouTube this is still a car channel so don't worry most of the stuff I'm going to post around this challenge will actually be on Instagram and Facebook and a little bit of Twitter so if you're not following me on those platforms please do because that's where I'm going to put a lot of the behind the scenes stuff and a lot of the interactivity so make sure you follow me on those so what's this all about then well as I said I am a car Channel and the vast bulk of my content is car related although I did do cycle Sunday which gave you a hint of my other past in life which is cycling this series of videos I wanted to just share my journey over the next five months with you some of you might be interested and some of you might not care at all and that's all good and I totally get that but I'm really becoming more and more passionate in you know I'm we're not getting any older I turned 50 last year and for me that was a big milestone and I want to make sure that I maintain my physical and mental well-being as best as possible I'm still mentally about 15 but turning 50 was a real thing for me and I want to make sure that I'm fit and healthy and able to do things now I've always been a fit and active person I've always enjoyed sport when I was a kid I played squash at quite a good level and then from squash I went into golf and I've played rugby and hockey and a few other other sports but my big sporting passion pre-youtube in the naughties was actually equestrianism so Tracy and I bought a horse at the beginning of the Northeast we've not been married very long and a hobby grew very quickly into an absolute passion and I ended up competing at Eventing so dressage show jumping and cross country and that for me was my life for pretty much seven eight years I was riding probably five or six times a week most weekends I was out competing and I absolutely loved my time doing Eventing um it may not be the the natural sport you link with me you know from from Cars to going to one horsepower and four leg drive but the adrenaline rush was second to none and for me it's still one of the most complex and difficult Sports I've ever tried to compete in unfortunately in about 2008 the horse that we had sustained a really nasty injury that meant it couldn't jump anymore and although we convalesced it through that injury so that it could do flat work my days competing in Eventing were over so in around about 2009 I I wanted some new challenge and I decided in my ultimate stupidity to run a marathon I'd never done any running before I couldn't run a bath and I just decided I really wanted to run a marathon I'd have a mate do it the year before so I just entered of the London Marathon and I did a four month training program and went from not running at all to competing in the London marathon and I targeted a sub four-hour time I ended up doing three hours 57 which I'm still to this day very very proud of in fact my medal is hanging on my office wall just above me and that for me was a fantastic process of not thinking you can't do something working really hard and training towards it and then doing it is a sense of achievement that I just cannot describe unless you've done it it's very difficult to describe the next year A friend of mine Darren who came on the NC 500 tour with me he'd entered a charity bike ride that was basically replicating the Tour de France route and we did the last five stages of the Tour de France route and I went out and bought myself a road bike and that was my first foray into Road cycling and I've been hooked ever since and we did that and that was an amazing five days of physical pain but amazing amazing uh feeling of success when we finished after that I did a number of longer rides and challenges I've cycled up monvon two three times I've done the Parry rube challenge I've done lots of big sportifs but in 2012 I turned 40 and decided to challenge myself with something else and combine my love of running and my love of cycling with my not so much love of swimming and I entered my first triathlon I entered the London Triathlon and and for me the process of of training for all three of those was very difficult very challenging but I had a huge sense of achievement when I finished the London Olympic distance triathlon unfortunately although I was a pretty fit at that point I then kind of tailed off YouTube comes along and work comes along I started my own company in 2012 and suddenly physical activity goes to one side and you end up working too much and very very quickly you can realize that you're putting on weight and you're getting out of shape and that is not good um so I ended up um going to see a personal trainer a guy called James Temple who will be in this series of videos and he kind of started to work on my fitness but he has a mantra you cannot out train a bad diet so at that point I started to realize how important nutrition is when you couple that with physical activity if you want really good physical health and I did a challenge with James over three months where I really focused on my nutrition really focused on my exercise and and strength workouts and so on and I actually lost over a stone and a half in three months and went from 20 body fat to under 13 body fat I'll put a picture up above I was a complete physical transformation but that taught me a lot and I thought great I've made it I got my six-pack fantastic guess what take your foot off the gas and it all comes back on again and by the beginning of last year when it was my 50th year I turned 50 last year a lot of my weight had come back on and I think that was coupled as well with doing YouTube you can you see yourself on screen and doing TVs even worse when I did vintage voltage you I could kind of see the weight in my face and and I started to get a bit stressed about about the fact that it was you know coming back again I wanted to be fitter so I decided over the summer to celebrate my 50th birthday year with a big big challenge So I entered my first half Ironman in May of this year I'm doing Iron Man Marbella 70.3 so it's a half Ironman so in order to help you understand what that is and what training I have ahead of me let me jump on my trainer my bike next to me and I'll tell you more about what a 70.3 Iron Man is and just what I've got ahead of myself okay now before we get going I don't want you to think that you can only get something out of this video series if you're going to do a half Iron Man because that's not the intention at all for me it's it's not about the the distance or the difficulty it's about challenging yourself you know it might be couch to 5K it might be walking around the block it might be anything you like a couple of years ago my sister my big sister said oh I could never do any of the challenges that you do and I said yeah you can and I challenge that year to run a 10K Fun Run and she didn't run at all and she was very badly unfit and no way could she run in her head at 10K by the end of the year we did the Great South Run 10 miles she ran the whole way absolutely smashed it changed her whole way of thinking about things so don't think you have to only watch this if you're gonna do a half Ironman it might be anything that is just a little bit beyond what you think you can do and then you do that and then you do something bigger and you do something bigger and then ultimately you end up inching a half Ironman you never know after this I might do a full lineman so what have I got ahead of myself well there's three disciplines swim by Run distances are swim 1900 meters or 1.2 miles then you jump on your bike and the bike is 90 kilometers which is 56 miles and then you go for a run and the run is 21.1 kilometers and the reason it's a weird distance is because it's half marathon 13.1 miles all one after another now in order to help me train for this I want to talk through each of the disciplines but I'm going to be working with two coaches two people James I've mentioned already he's going to be helping me with Strength and Fitness and Nutrition I see him as a personal trainer every week anyway and we're just going to adapt the program that we do together to work on leg strength lots of squats and just general strength but what I'm not going to do with James is any of the technique I'm going to do that with a guy called Matt Jolly who actually was my swim trainer and swim coach when I did the London triathlon so Matt is an endurance athlete he does like 100 mile endurance runs and double marathons and stuff like that and together um with him I've joined the Chichester Triathlon Club and I'm working with those guys to help me on my technique so the first biggest challenge for me is swimming I'm a pretty good breaststroker but the problem with that is breaststroke is a leg stroke and I could easily swim 1900 meters I over on holiday in the summer last year I swam two miles breaststroke but if you do that in a triathlon you come out the water get on your bike and your legs are shot and you need your legs for this for the running and the cycling so you need to be doing front crawl and my front crawl is very very inefficient so I've already been going to chitchester Triathlon Club they've got some fantastic swim coaches there Matt being one of them and they're working on my swim technique it is all about technique to make yourself as efficient as possible I'll put some video over as I'm talking uh this video by the way was shot probably about six weeks ago and I got this problem when my right hand is kind of coming across and that's not very efficient at all I'm working on that in a big way but the swimming for me I need to be able to get through that and do it as efficiently and as quickly as possible but hopefully the strength part is the bike and the Run bike next I'm on my bike now anybody watch cycle Sunday you're probably thinking where's the Bianchi well I will be doing the actual day the road ride on the Bianchi but I've got myself a smart trainer and I've connected my old specialized to my smart train I didn't want to smash up the drivetrain of the Bianchi on the smart trainer and I'm using zwift the online training platform and so far not used a smart trainer before but it's the ability to put you in a world of pain very quickly is fantastic so I'm spending a lot of time on the smart trainer and then as the weather improves I'll be doing more and more long rides and I'll be keeping you up to date of what I'm doing there the big thing for me here and I've never done it before in cycling is this measures my power so at the moment I'm doing 140 watts of power because I'm just reaching along um and I'm starting to learn to ride to power and I think that would be very important on the day and so that I can push myself to the ultimate without going too far I'm going into the red and blowing up basically so for me the big part in the road cycling part is increasing my power decreasing my body weight so I get as much watts per kilo as possible there's a lot of work to be done on the cycling and then the last thing is the Run now firstly you need to train your body to run off the bike so I'm doing that I'll go on a ride here inside and then I'll go for a quick run up the road just to get used to that but the running around here is very hilly I do a lot of running off-road on Trails I've got some beautiful Hills out the back of the house I go out with a dog at the moment sort of minimum I'd go out for is Maybe 10 kilometers six miles and I'll be increasing that length and also trying to increase my pace um over the next couple of months and then you just start to tie them all together I know individually I could probably do each of the elements now it's doing them one after another it's going to be super difficult so that's pretty much it really so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a do a video with my two trainers with James and Matt so you can see the kind of things that they're doing try and give you some basic tips on just general fitness and well-being and keeping an eye on that if you like and then we'll go through my journey Ironman Marbella is at the beginning of May so Tracy and I will be flying out there and doing that the course looks beautiful the swim is in the sea just off of the little Port of puta bonus uh the ride looks quite nice it goes up into the Mountains and the countryside around Puerto Venus and Marbella and then the run is along the coast up and down the top of the beach which looks beautiful sure would be beautiful by the time I fit it but I'd love to know what you think I know it's a bit different in terms of a video but keep an eye on my Instagram keep an eye on my Facebook and Twitter keeping all my progress anyway I'm gonna get my head down and do some more work on this then I might go out for a run anyway hope you enjoyed that if you did give me a thumbs up comments below are always welcome and if you haven't done so already please subscribe to Petra bed for plenty more content to come and I'll see you on the next film guys you take care drive safe all right foreign\n"