This month has been a big training month for me and the north west academy as we had our half term training camp at Loughborough university. This was a great opportunity as we would be using the amazing facilities that Loughborough had to offer. We were going to be staying at the elite athlete hotel which is only a stone’s throw from the training facilities on the Loughborough campus. The week included lots of hard training, one of the hardest sessions came on the first day of the camp which was a swim set that included 10x200m as fast as you could go. I surprised myself by swimming every rep faster than the last rep, with swimming being my weakest discipline out of the three this showed me that there are great things to come over the next season.
We also had a long run straight after the swim, the weather was horrible and 2k in we hit a barrier that came in the form of massive puddle, instead of avoiding the puddle we decided to just wade straight through it, we would regret this decision as it was not the last puddle we would be facing. By the end of the run we were soaked and regretting our decisions.
After a good night sleep, we survived the next two days but hit a barrier on the fourth day which came in the form of an 80km ride. Doesn’t sound to hard right? Well it was, it was wet cold and really windy, but we survived and was rewarded with a massive lunch.
The next few days were tuff but I just held on to the end of the camp. But it wasn’t over there, the day after the camp I was racing at the national cross-country championships in Nottingham. This was a massive race and all the best runners were there on the day, I was in the bottom year of the age group and wasn’t expecting much from the race as I was very tired after the camp. I ran as hard as I could from start to finish and somehow came 11th which was a great result after a hard weeks training. Next up, inter counties and then English schools the week after.
Thank you to all the coaches that helped on the camp and thank you to pedal potential for the continued support over the 2020 season.