Celtman, Coffee, Cake and a Collie

  It's 3am and my alarm beeps loudly.  I switch it off, take a moment to open my eyes, and crawl out of bed.  It's race day.  Actually, I've been hesitating to call it a 'race' - for me it is an event, an adventure, a challenge to get myself to the finish line.   Long Post Alert! This is my story of how the Celtman Solo Point Five 2023 panned out for me.  If you have a short attention span - cut to the end - if not, read on and I hope as well as helping me reflect on the day, it will give a flavour of how it felt to go through the experience.  Swim round an island, bike round a peninsula, and run round a mountain.  That's all (!) I need to do.  Bike racked, GPS tracker collected, T2 bag dropped off (I'll see that again later in the day), T1 set up, wetsuit donned, hugs exchanged with friends also toeing the start line...  I drop into the water and swap a few words with Rich, the kayaker forming one end of the start line, and Paul - ...

The training is done, planning complete, registration and briefing attended.  Now all I have to do is swim round an island, bike round a peninsula, and run round a mountain.   I thought I'd feel nervous, but in truth, I don't.  I feel a bit like a child on Christmas Eve, wondering what presents will be under the tree in the morning... except I know exactly what presents I'll get, I just don't quite know what will happen when I set out with each one.      We start at 5am tomorrow, the weather is looking kind, and if all goes to plan it should take me around 9-10 hours to complete the route.  I always said that my goal was to make it to the start line in one piece, with a belief that I can complete the event.  Well, the start is less than 12 hours away, and I believe I can do it.  So no matter what happens tomorrow, I've done what I set out to do.  I've done every inch of the course at least once, and I just need to put it all together. ...

  Tapering is an odd thing.  Done all the training, the event is almost here, and you start reducing the volume of training... and all of a sudden all the niggles, anxieties and little irrational worries come crawling out of the woodwork.  We're all set up in Shieldaig, our home until after the Celtman Solo Point Five, and athletes and their support crews have started arriving for the full-distance Celtman which takes place this weekend.  We nipped across to Gairloch this morning, so Mark could do a mountain bike route and I could swim from a sandy beach as the weather's been so warm.   And... 😮 ...Jellyfish soup! (Size 7 Croc for scale...)  It's 25 degrees here just now, and the water feels warm - unusually so for this time of year - so I thought I'd swim without gloves or socks.  I lasted a mere 10 metres (yes, metres!) until the fear took over.  Suddenly I was overcome by the fear of having feet or hands stung, and being injured before next Sa...

This time in two weeks I'll be... Well, it's 9:30am just now, so with a start time of 5am I will be four and a half hours into the Celtman Solo Point Five.   If everything has gone to plan, that will put me somewhere on the coast road at the North end of the Applecross peninsula.  I will have swum round Eilean Shieldaig, biked over the Bealach na Ba, and done some of the 'Coast Road' hills.  I'll still have the rest of the bike route to go to T2 in Torridon, will have 90 minutes to make it to the bike cut-off, and then the small matter of a 24km run/walk around Liathach.  How do I feel?   Well, a heady mixture of excitement intertwined with terror, and a sprinkling of disbelief that I've made it this far.  I've tried to train for big events in the past, and always ended up injured.  Whether that's just down to physiology, weight, or ramping up training in a way that didn't suit my body, it always ended with me not completing the event; not even makin...