The Tribulations of a Travelling Triathlete

Before returning to the UK for summer, I'd be slogging away on my absurdly hot and sweaty training runs in Dubai, dreaming of ice and ice cream and all other things ice related... And of racing under more running-friendly conditions while at home. Those who have known me for the whole four years I've been running will know all about my love-hate relationship with the Great North 10k in Gateshead - A race I never seem to enjoy yet am always perusaded to enter. As well as this, a very good friend of mine kindly arranged for me to run one of my all-time favourite 10k races in the beautiful city of York. Although the results aren't massively different (both pretty rubbish by my pre-injury standards), my feelings throughout these two races differed massively. In this post I shall compare the two... Preparation:  GN10K: Sleeping well. Stretching plenty. A couple of runs in the UK to readjust to the conditions.   York 10K: Ten days no running, but lots of other activi...

So I was SUPER excited to find out that a triathlon group was going to start running (and swimming and cycling *cough*) in Sharjah and to get them going had started a really cool ‘run before iftar’ initiative during the month of Ramadan to raise awareness of their presence!  First of all I want to make it known that Sharjah Triathlon, in their huge efforts to get people outdoors and thinking about their fitness and health, put on this event for free. Yep, you heard me. No charge. Nil dirhams. Zero. Nada. ZILCH. They offered photos, a medal, a beautiful technical shirt and a full post-race goodie bag to all participants for FREE. Due to a clear lack of fitness culture here in the UAE I felt this was a really great move, well done Sharjah Tri!! Sadly I couldn’t attend their equally hot and sweaty evening sessions as  I  was so busy wrapping up end-of-term stuff at work (swimming in end of term reports, exams to be marked and last minute admin counts as training, ...

It's now summer in Dubai. Well, it's always summer in Dubai, but now it's, you know, SUMMER. I mean the hotter than hell, non-negotiable, I-could-burst-into-flames-at-any-given-moment ARABIAN DESERT summer. UGH. Being an English northerner, I struggle in the heat at the best of times but it seemed like the Weather Gods of the Middle East decided to surprise me by upping the temperatures by 10*C overnight, three days before my race. Cheers guys. Appreciate it.  I did kind of expect it when I signed up for the race, but it would have been much more helpful if the temperatures increased slowly. Nope. Boom - Dante's Inferno. Have fun, suckers! I told myself repeatedly that because it was a night run, the evening would be cooler and more manageable. But there's another problem - It was a weekday evening. After work. Work meaning 8 hours of teaching a wonderful (but very loud and demanding) class of 7 year olds. I came home work feeling a bit like this.....

6:45am on a Friday, jet lagged, sleep deprived and sick of the sound of my own name after spending a week in London with a bunch of ...'excitable' teenagers, poor Tom was the only motivating force to get my sorry, sleepy arse out of bed for this 800 meter swim event. This seemed like such a great idea at the time I signed up... WEEKS AGO... But after a fun but slightly torturous week with the 'little darlings,' (who apparently don't even need to sleep), plunging myself into cold ocean water with hundreds of other endurance idiots was feeling less and less like a good idea. While Tom was sweet-talking me out of bed, offering me breakfast and talking about driving me down and coming to watch, I was nodding and smiling agreeably while frantically thinking of reasons for him NOT to come, because I had The Fear. As a middle - to - back of the pack athlete, The Fear Of Coming Last is very, very real! I wasn't emotionally ready for Tom to see me stumbling out of th...

Hey everyone! Thanks for reading my little diary about the things I love most :-) I'm Robyn, I'm a 24 year old teacher from Newcastle UK, I currently live in Dubai, UAE and I have an addiction to endurance sport and visiting new places! My first race number arrived in the post 4 years ago today, so I've been doing the endurance sport thing for quite a while and have run too many events to backdate and reflect on every single one, but here are the events I've run since that important first race... and I will tell you all about the events I've taken part in so far this year, and the places I've visited since moving out here in the middle east :-) Races Run In chronological order... 1. April 28th 2013 - Sunderland City 10k 2. September 13 2013 - Bupa Great North Run 3. September 20th 2013 - Prudhoe Miners' 10k 4. May 25th 2014 - Sunderland City 10k 5. 9th June 2014 - Blaydon Race 6. 6th July 2014 - Kaleidoscope 5k 7. 13 July 2014 - Bupa Great No...