One of the interesting things about doing 110 events is that inevitably you have to do a number of them simultaneously – and the impact upon your body can be quite intriguing. Last week I went for a training run and cycle on the Monday afternoon (to prepare for my triathlon this summer) and then did wrestling on Tuesday evening. I’ll be blogging separately about my wrestling experience but suffice it to say that you spend a lot of time in a crouching position and that it’s hard work on the thighs.
By the time, Liz, Jon and I joined Richard Houlihan and Craig ‘Bring the Noise’ Lacy for our high and triple jump sessions on the Wednesday morning, my legs were feeling it. After an hour of warming up and learning the basics of the Fosbury Flop they were distinctly weary. By the time we’d finished our high jumping (featuring a crash course in reality versus expectation on my part), and started the triple jump, I was really struggling.
Which is a shame because the triple jump is brilliant. The basics of doing a hop followed by a step followed by a jump aren’t difficult. Combining it with a run up – and then achieving a meaningful distance – is another matter. In particular, it’s very difficult to get any distance on the step once you’ve done a full blown hop. (Try it and you’ll see what I mean).
As readers of this blog may be aware, our target when doing the field events is to achieve half the height or distance of the world record. (We aim to do the running events in twice the world record time.) The current world record for the triple jump is 18.29m (held by Jonathan Edwards) so we needed to hit 9.15m to achieve our goal. Unfortunately I fell well short (at 8m) so I’ll have to get back into the sand pit in the near future.
For the record I scraped 1m40 in the high jump – not great for a man of my height. (The ‘half the world record’ target was 1.23m).
Huge thanks to Richard, Craig and GLL for another top class session, and to everyone who has sponsored me so far. If you haven’t yet, please do so now. http://www.virginmoneygiving.com/dansgoldchallenge Every penny goes to a fantastic cause in the work that NSPCC, Cancer Research UK, Oxfam, Right To Play and Scope do.
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