Hello everyone and welcome to Blog # 15 as I continue my journey to the greatest challenge of my life, surpassing Ultraman Australia 2016 by adding to it. 3+2+1= Charity, where I am completing 3 Half Ironman events over 3 consecutive weekends in December 2016, 2 Ironman distance events over 2 weeks in February / March 2017, and 1 Ultraman event in May 2017. A total of 1306 km’s of Swimming, Cycling and Running over the 6 events to raise funds for the ‘Children of the New Zealand Defence Force Fallen Heroes’ (plus god only knows how many km’s in training Qwik Kiwi’s Head Coach and Director Coach Ray Boardman will have me do).
As you will be aware from my previous Blog (# 14) I completed the Taupo Ultra-Marathon Trail Run of 50 km’s in the weekend leading up to this weeks training. As such Coach Ray has taken into consideration the rest and recovery component for this weeks training, which has still had all three activities on various days of Swimming, Cycling and Running but to a lesser duration than normal, same for when the ‘Brick’ session of Cycling followed immediately by a Run was scheduled for Wednesday. I was surprised by how fatigued I felt in the days after the Trail Run which I will write about separately, trail running is certainly different to road running thats for sure. I finished this week off by attending an Auction with NZ Police in Rotorua for the charitable cause of raising funds for one of their colleagues with terminal cancer. It was great to also train back in that location of the North Island whilst their.
This brings me to my photo’s for the week, which are of the ‘Closing Ceremony’ for Ultraman Australia. The first photo is of one of the event staff carrying the Ultraman Australia sign into the dinner, with us athletes carrying our country flag behind her. The second photo is of myself carrying the NZ Flag accompanied by Dave Oliver, I felt really privileged as Dave gave me the honour of carrying the flag (being Military) even though his results were streaks ahead of mine at Ultraman (the measure of the man). The third photo is of us on stage to the applause of the audience for what we had achieved.
Photo’s courtesy of Barry Alsop of Eyes Wide Open Images, Official Photographer for Ultraman Australia 2016.
Take care Blog followers and hope you had a safe and relaxing Labour Weekend (with some training in the mix)… Regards John Humphries (Aka UltraHumps, Aka Humps)!