Its now the end of November.

My race season has officially ended and I’m keeping myself amused with cyclocross racing through the winter. I’m treating these races very much as fun and they’re really helping to lighten the impact of hard winter training. Cyclocross is new to me and I’m finding it really refreshing to challenge myself with completely new things to learn. Each of the races I’ve entered so far has been different to the others and so I find myself constantly in that invigorating place between being consciously incompetent and consciously competent. Thankfully I can report that as each race progresses I spend more time in the conscious competence zone!

So the focus for this post is a review of the season. It’s certainly had its ups and downs with results seeming to improve as the year went on. I thought it would be useful to look back at my Development Plan for the year and see how I have done as objectively as possible.

You can see that I broke my 2017 plan into three parts.

Part one is my ambition for the year and whilst I know it is not within my control, it is the articulation of why I do it all. I’m driven by a desire to be the best I can be and recognition of this through winning medals and qualifying for world championships is hugely important to me. The dream of achieving my ambition excites me and motivates me to work hard, to work consistently, to do those sessions that I don’t really feel like doing. It gets me out of bed on cold dark mornings to swim when I’m feeling really tired. It gets me out on the bike when its chucking down with rain outside. Without a clear ambition I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be as consistent in my approach to training as I have been. So achieving my qualification spot for South Africa next year has been deeply satisfying.

Part two are the performance goals. They represent the “what”. What do I need to nail in order to achieve my ambitions? These were very specific, should be within my control and represented a step change from what I had been doing in performance terms in 2016.

Finally part three are the development objectives, the “how” that provides day to day focus and if I could follow them consistently would give me a fighting chance of improving my performance in line with my goals.

So how did I get on with my development objectives ? These were the key areas where I felt there was most room for improvement. Well, early morning swimming has gone from a chore to a great way to start my day in 2017. I’m proud to confirm that I now enjoy rather than endure swimming and as a result I hit the 15 sessions a month target with an average set of 2500m. This consistency has been key to my improved confidence and speed in the water.

I have definitely been consciously experimenting with my cycling cadence and have also been much more focused on training how I race and thus spending many more hours on the TT bike in the aero position. Doing this has helped me to find a cadence that works for me and given me more confidence for race days, so another big tick. However, I have to confess that I failed miserably with my objective to race more TT’s in 2017. ( I think I did one!) I can’t explain this, as I love the simplicity and purity of a TimeTrial and I even have a regular Thursday evening event that goes virtually past my house. Maybe I was just unrealistic in what I could fit into my training programmes?

I set myself some clear nutrition objectives for the first time this year because I thought I would benefit from losing weight for racing. I’m so pleased that I constructed these objectives in such a way that they focused on food types and better meal planning rather than trying to hit a weight number. As a result I really enjoyed learning more about cooking and the way that food influences energy levels and didn’t get negatively hung up on whether I was losing weight. I don’t remember stepping on the scales at all throughout the year but do know that I went into races confident that I was full of the right stuff to perform.

When I put this plan together I remember thinking hard about the specifics of my performance goals. I thought that I needed benchmarks and so deliberately developed a goal for each of the three triathlon disciplines. I imagined that they would remain clearly at the front of my mind throughout the first half of the year and become a real driver for training performance. However, they didn’t. My marathon goal was nailed in early April and this gave me such a boost. Soon after however I was into triathlon race season and so the opportunities to really test myself against the other targets didn’t seem to occur. The reality of my training workload is that most of the time I’m feeling relatively fatigued and so perhaps don’t feel that PB chasing in training is realistic and I didn’t get myself organized sufficiently to enter any individual discipline races during the tri season. Hence, no focus on the PB speed goals. I need to rethink how I approach this for next year. Ultimately though, the important thing to look at is what happened in races and did I manage to improve ? The year was about middle distance racing and I’m pleased to report significant improvements versus 2016. Despite not putting all three disciplines together as well as I’d like I still managed to beat my 70.3 personal best twice throughout the season. I delivered a 10% improvement versus 2016 in my swim splits and a 15 minute or 6% improvement in my bike splits from the previous year. The run, which has always been my strength, was an enigma in 2017. I don’t feel that I went so hard in races on the bike that I’d got nothing left when it came to the run and yet for multiple reasons I didn’t manage to put in a strong run performance until the final race of the year. I’m confident though, that next year I’ll be banging out impressive runs to finish off my races( and maybe set some more PB’s)

My conclusion therefore is that its been another great season. I’m another year older, another year more experienced, I’ve learnt new things and importantly its been another year of getting quicker.

This is really encouraging and a mighty endorsement of Coach Annie’s work.

You really can be FasterAfter50.

A few highlights:

• Marathon Personal Best of 3:12:33
• Qualification for Great Britain AG Triathlon team for 2018 Euro Championships at Standard and Middle distance
• Qualification for Great Britain AG Duathlon team for 2018 Euro Championships at Standard and Middle distance
• Silver Medal at English National Duathlon Championships ( Standard Distance)
• 70.3 Personal Best in Dublin of 4:53:16
• Qualification for Ironman 70.3 World Championships in South Africa 2018

Huge thanks to my Coach Annie Emmerson, my sponsor Erdinger Alkoholfrei, my physio Gemma @ Anatomy in Chester and most of all to my amazing wife Kathy for encouraging me to follow my dreams.