My sporting background revolves around swimming. I first learnt to swim when I was 5years old, though my Mum thought the standard of teaching was well below par so now she runs the club that I learnt to swim with! I carried on swimming getting more and more competitive through my teens with the obvious blip as my motivation and parents' patience was tested. I needed a new challenge after a pretty uneventful swimming career in the scheme of things and was introduced into Triathlon by a good friend Sue Macrowen who pointed me in the direction of the London Youth Games Triathlon. I had always run for my school and had even joined a running club at one stage but it just didn’t seem to fit in around my swimming schedule. My first Triathlon was at the London Youth Games in 1994 I think but I loved it and the following year had my first tri bike to have another go. I now coach this team for my local borough and love supporting future triathletes first outings. That year I entered my first sprint distance race at Saffron Walden as well finishing first junior. I proceeded to follow through with this new sport over the coming years showing no real great results or potential. This did not surprise me, if I’ve ever wanted to be good at anything I’ve always had to work harder than most…
I worked mainly over Olympic distance with the odd step up to half Ironman. In 1997 I won the British Middle Distance Junior Title but decided that Olympic distance was more my thing. Over the coming years I competed at national age group level and was lucky enough to be selected for the Cancun team where I was also the age group men’s team captain. From this year on though my life seemed to be taking a bit of a turn. My new job didn’t quite pan out the way I would have liked working 60hours per week and training very little with a very unrealistic pay structure (though I did have a lovely flashy company car and a tax bracket to match!!). I could no longer handle not being able to train and so left and headed to Australia for our winter to train from November 2004 to May 2005. I ended up training with the Triathlon Gold group whose resume reads like a who’s who of Ozzie Tri. It was during this stay I managed to link up with my coach at the time and inspiration to me still, Bill Davoren, and I made the swap to long course.
I returned to the Uk reinvigorated and back in love with the sport and sacrifice associated with it. How does the story end? I don’t know but to be honest I’m looking forward to the middle not the end!
