Winter Training By Davina Greenwell

It is a sad time of the year when we reach the season of dark nights, cold weather and indoor training. Since racing the Hever Castle triathlon I have had a few easy weeks where I suffered from the first cold of the season and spent my evening cleaning my house and not getting up at 5 in the morning. This sounds like a lovely break, but in reality I was bored after a few days.

I dragged my horse out the nettles to do some show jumping as he had been looking a bit fat and lazy, so I thought it was time to get him out and about. In return for the lack of attention I had shown him, he went to his first competition behaved very badly.

In my opinion, the only good thing about winter is cross country running. It is a great chance to race and be part of a team. Last weekend saw the first league race of the season. I have done virtually no running since Hever but wanted to go and have some fun with my friends from the running club. One of the first problems was finding all my kit and it turns out storing your spikes covered in last year’s mud outside in a garage does not do them any favours! The race was taking place at Writtle College in Essex and the ground was pretty solid and there was no mud at all. I enjoyed most of the race but failed pretty dramatically to tie my shoelaces up. When the first one came undone after mile 1 I thought, "I can deal with this" but the other one came undone after mile 3 so I carried on with my spikes virtually falling off after every step! I kept my shoes on to finish 6th girl which I was pretty happy about having done very little running and given that I almost lost both my shoes. 

I am now getting back into the swing of training although a lot of it is indoors. I suspect by the end of the winter I will have watched the whole of Netflix on my turbo! I am looking forward to a “holiday” to Cyprus in a couple of weeks to train with ETE training camps and my coach Perry Agass. Fingers crossed that there is plenty of sunshine!