I have to give my sincerest apologies to Scott and Rich who sent me this post over a month ago! A combination of work trips and some vacation kept me from putting this up sooner. But I am truly in awe as I can barely finish 2 miles on the treadmill! Way to go guys!

Team Projects Abroad: Rich, Lindy and Scott. Look at those snazzy Projects Abroad t-shirts!

When Rich (Richard Clowes, Deputy Director) first asked me if I wanted to take part in some relay triathlons, my natural instinct was to decline. When he told me the events were in 6 months time that changed the matter slightly. Surely this was enough time to get a training schedule together? Fast forward 6 months, and with very little in the way of training, our London triathlon was upon us. It was time to compete!

The team was made up of Rich (cycling), Lindy (swimming) and me (running). We were running on behalf of Projects Abroad. It’s fair to say we didn’t have the best preparation. As 6 days previous we had been competing in our first triathlon in Trentham. I’ve still not properly forgiven Rich for entering us in this colossus – 2000 meters of swimming (that’s 80 lengths of a 25 metre pool), 56 miles of cycling and 13.1 miles of running! We finished 17th out of 115 overall competitors and 2nd in the relay. Happy days! Well, not for long! On awaking on Monday morning someone seemed to have replaced my legs with lead weights. The only consolation was I knew Rich was feeling a little on the tired side. His text simply read “Oh my god, I can’t wake up”. It’s ok I told myself, it’ll be fine once I get to the Projects Abroad office. This was true in that I got to sit down for most of the day. But I did have to put up with my colleagues laughing at me trying to climb our stairs and getting in and out of the car. At least we had 4 more days to recover.

From the moment Terry (Projects Abroad Operations Manager) and I got in the car on Saturday morning I knew it was going to be a tough day. Blazing sunshine (the hottest day of the year so far), a traffic jam on the M25 and we very nearly missed our turning off of the motorway. The event was taking place at the Excel Centre in the Docklands area of London. There were 12,000 people competing in various events to give you an idea of the scale of the day. We had signed up for the Olympic relay distance – 1500m swim, 40k cycle and a 10k run. Each team was given an electronic chip which had to be passed over in the ‘Transition Area’. Lindy (AKA the bionic woman) got us off to an amazing start. Coming in the top 10 swim finishers - she swam 1500 metres in 22 minutes. Truly remarkable! Rich had the toughest gig of the afternoon cycling 40k in the highest temperature of the day. He still managed to zip round in a great time of 1 hour 15 minutes. My run took 42 minutes which was enough to see us finish 39th out of 400 competitors. It really was an amazing event to take part in. A fantastic atmosphere, a good challenge and awareness raised for a number of leading charities.

Scott in action

Our next triathlon is at the start of September. Surely there’s enough time to get some training in?

Thanks again to Projects Abroad for sponsoring us.