One of the things I didn’t do so well with last year, was with my swimming. I basically have not swum for 18 months now. But in the middle of it all, June 2011, I did the Total Immersion Swimming technique swim camp. This in itself was a good move as I learned a lot about technique and swimming better, where it didn’t work so well was that I spent $600 plus a weekend in Brisbane learning, then didn’t get back into the pool – and now it is May the following year – 11 months on.

So my first goal this year is the 2012 10km run at the Gold Coast Marathon weekend. Hopefully I can do my best time, but I’ve dropped off the pace a bit in my training over the last few weeks. Once I have gotten through that, I think its time to get back in the pool. I’ll aim for 4 swim sessions a week. For the first month, I think I will run over all the TI training info and just drill like crazy. See if I can put it all together. From there I might see if I can do a refresher – I know they have 1 day courses now. From there, 1 drill session per week plus 3 squads I think will do nicely.

It would be great that come proficiency testing for life saving this year, that I can do my best time in the pool. That is the second goal for this year.

So as per my previous post, 2011 wasn’t the most productive year. That being said, I did make some really smart moves. Most of them involved putting the foundation building blocks in place so I could move forward. Here are the 3 smartest moves I made in 2011.

Health

Firstly with my health. The most frustrating thing about last year was the constant illness. I was never very sick, just consistently sick. I think I picked up a flu or a cold every fortnight between November 2010 and November 2011. So at the beginning of November 2011 I went and saw a naturopath called Peter Edwards. He has basically corrected my health through diet, stripping out all the rubbish that was making my body labor and that was reducing my health. Since starting to see Peter, I have been sick twice. Still not perfect but two colds in 6 months is a massive improvement on 12 colds in 6 months. If you are interested in the type of health process Peter promotes, click through here to one of his health eBooks which we are currently putting online. Its not finished today, but should be in the next 2 – 3 weeks.

The emphasis of Peter’s treatments are to get your body working as it should – not to treat the symptoms of illness when they present. Building blocks.

Combating Injury

Towards the end of my run up to the Gold in 2010, my left shoulder stopped working properly. There have also been quite a few injuries that I have documented along the way too. Groin strains, my foot injury (that one took over 4 months to heal and still has some lingering feeling there) etc. One thing I started doing at the end of 2010 is see a structural chiropractor. I have been seeing Grant now twice a week since then. Grant’s style is not to treat injuries, or to build up specific muscle groups to compensate for fragile areas, rather it is to unwind the compensations and remove the structural issues from the body. The idea is to bring the spine back to natural alignment so the body works as naturally as possible so you don’t need the compensations – and you don’t get the injuries. Grant is putting a website together shortly – I’ll try and provide a link once it is complete.

Once again though, the emphasis of this treatment is not to treat a problem, rather to build a correct and natural structure. I look forward to getting back into ski training to see the impact as just by looking in the mirror I am standing so much straighter.

Finding Time

Business really took over my life in 2011 too. So one thing I did was contact top business coach Blair Harding for help putting in systems to both improve the profitability of the business and also to free my time. That has started moving in the right direction now, we are only 6 weeks in now though so I look forward to looking back, this time next year.

They are the three big things I think that I did well last year. The biggest one thing I learned from the year was:

1. Sometimes you have to – and it really pays to just stop, put everything on hold and just go back to basics

Its been a long time since I have posted on this blog. My Coolangatta Gold Dream is still well and truly alive, but 2011 ended up being a really difficult year in basically all aspects of my life, leading to a real need to pull right back, start everything from scratch again and rebuild all my foundations. This included matters of family, health and business. So the short of it was I didn’t have the capacity physically, emotionally or temporally (Ie didn’t have the time) to do any training of any committed nature. So it all slipped big time. Add a new baby into the mix (Jai born January 2011) reduced my capacity to do anything meaningful further.

Spiritually though – I still wanted to get out there. I actually made about 8 starts last year. Each time though, I ended up with an injury or illness which “pulled me out of the game”. So I ended up saying “STOP”. I took a big step back and focused on foundations again. It was a long and very difficult process but now on the other side of it, it was definitely worthwhile. Family life is much more harmonious, business is running much smoother and I have been able to string a number of weeks of training together without getting ill.

So I am back into it. My goal – Coolangatta Gold 2013. A little bit further down the track than my original plan, but that’s life isn’t it. So now it is April 2012 – the Gold has been moved to September now – so that gives me about 17 months to get there. Over the coming weeks I’ll write a little bit about what happened last year, some of the good and bad moves I made and what I need to do moving forward. I’ve set some intermediary goals, so I have a few things to aim for, which I’ll run through too.

Thats it for now – but as I have done my first post here in 12 months – I really must be back

Well, about 6 weeks ago my left ankle pulled up sore after a short (5km) run. I thought it would be ok after a week or so of rest as I didn’t do anything to it (Ie, no twist, no “click”, no sprain etc) it was just sore.

I carried it into the Queensland titles at Kurrawa but as it had stabilised, I though I’d still compete in the beach sprints. This was a bad move – it completely gave out and I limped over the line last. Its now a total of 6 weeks since the original issue and I’ve basically done nothing over that period apart from a handful of ski and board paddles. The ankle is 95% better but I still have no idea what the injury was. The x-ray came up with nothing, but I forwent the $300 for an MRI.

So what does this mean for my year? Well, I am going to start running again this week – I’ll probably start with a handful of 3km runs to see how it holds up. All going well, I think I’ll go hard for the 10km run on Marathon weekend rather than just making the half. For the Coolangatta Gold this year, I’m clearly not going to make the start line for an individual effort now, but I have hooked up with a team – where I’ll be doing the run leg. It will just be really nice to continue my involvement in this amazing event during the year.

So on the water side of things, over winter I can have a stack of fun in the surf and really start working on surf skills and general technique.From there, I can have a gradual fitness build and another tilt at the individual event in 2012.

…The saga continues!

Its been no secret I have been battling with health a bit this year. I can see this is really on three fronts.

1. Illness – My immune system has been down, causing me to get sick quite regularly, particularly when picking up my training load.
2. Injury – I am still getting intermittent injuries – mainly lower legs and in my left shoulder.
3. Stress – Just general life stuff which saps energy, motivation etc

One thing I have really noticed though when seeking advice on these issues, from friends, health professionals and qualified medical practitioners, is that 95% of the time the approach to healing seems completely wrong. The approach invariably seems to be focused on adding something into the mix to try and create a new balance, rather than finding the cause of the problem, removing it and thereby reinstating the natural balance.

A great example is with my recent illnesses. I personally think it is a food allergy at the moment, which was exposed by the pressure I put my body under when training for the Gold last year. Now, I’ve seen a local doctor two or three times about this over the course of the illnesses and firstly I was prescribed anti-biotics – with the disastrous effects the week before the gold. Second I was tested for asthma and I was tried on Ventolin. On my third visit, I asked him about nutrition and food allergies. This visit was really insightful to me as the doc and I had a really great discussion on how “nutrition” and other such therapies works in the Australian medical world.

A big problem that currently exists in the Australian medical world is that if a doctor cannot make a treatment “medical”, they cannot get the treatment through to the client without pressure of some kind from Medicare. Now – this is all heresay, just from my conversation with the doctor, so I do not know what the whole story is or anything like that, but the impression I got is that Medicare’s approval of treatments govern much of what the doctors these days can do. And medical change (understandably I must say) being so slow, treating illness with things like “nutrition” is still a little “voodoo” (his words not mine) in most medical circles.

So the result of this is that I walked into the doctors with asthma like symptoms, for the first time in my life as a 37 year old adult,  and rather than find what caused the reaction and remove it, I was prescribed Ventolin as the first option.

Speaking to many others about the issues I’ve been battling with, the same thing happens. Not so much on the prescription side of things, rather on the supplement side of things. The number of supplements I’ve been recommended have been as numerous as they have been varied. Boost immunity, fight bacteria etc – they all must be good, but still they seem to be fighting symptoms, rather than the problem. This became really clear to me in speaking to Kerry from the health food shop across the road. She has been helping me try and suss out what is causing the inbalance in the first place, by gradually removing and reintroducing things from my diet. By finding what is causing the reactions though and removing it, the body works as it should do and may not need the other stuff.

I’ve been kind of lucky this year too in that I have started long term Chiropractic work with Grant Phillips. I have had structural issues with my back and neck, causing shin splints, spasms, injuries all over the place, for as long as I can remember. Grants philosophy as I understand it is quite simple. At the back of your spine, there are no muscles to pull the spine back in alignment. So if it gets out of alignment in that direction (as all of our spines do with age) it needs help going back into balance. Incorrect alignment is what creates all the injuries. So correcting alignment will prevent the injuries from occuring.

When I remember all the other professional treatments I have had, they have all recognised the misalignment, but rather than correct that they created a treatment based on building muscle in different areas of the body to try and pull things back into place. In other words, they have been about creating an un-natural compensation to rebalance, rather than removing the original misalignment.

Stress is the same too isn’t it? Meditation, yoga, exercise, burn it off. Its probably way more healthy just to correct the source of the stress – but that’s probably the longest term thing to correct for all of us isn’t it.

Its been a bit of a battle to get back into training this year. Among other things, I seem to be getting sick a lot and now there is another baby in my home.Once you are out of the routine, it can be difficult to get back into it. This  is the real battle I have been facing. Since the last time I got sick, I just haven’t been able to get the motivation back again to hit the track.

I had life saving patrol on the weekend though. During my 6 hour patrol, I managed to get 45 minutes swimming and body surfing and then also an hour out on the rescue board, paddling around the flagged area, keeping an eye on things etc. I really enjoyed my time in the water. All of a sudden – I have a spark of motivation to get things moving again.

Surf Life Saving huh – there are so many reasons why its great to be involved.

Well, now I have 2 children. Jai Damian was born on January 22nd. I have to admit, I’m over the moon – it is so nice having a baby in the house again.

That being said – it does put an additional pressure on my time and another complication into my schedule. I now have not trained for about 3 weeks and cannot see how I am going to fit a session in for at least 1 – 2 more weeks. The only way I can see this progressing is earlier and earlier mornings.

I have decided though to lift a lot of pressure off my shoulders. I can’t do everything, I’ll still have a crack at 2011, but if it does not work out, there is 2012, 2013, 2014 etc etc etc.

Anyway, that’s all I am going to write – I need to get back to my son

Well, last Thursday I woke up with a sore throat. This progressed into a fever and fluey aches and pains on Friday, and basically I haven’t trained since. This has been the most frustrating 2 – 3 months of my life, insofar as illness impacting training (and just life for that matter) is concerned. It seems I get back into training and I get sick. I think I have had 1 week sick, 2 weeks healthy consistently since the Gold.

So this week I am keeping a food diary. I have a qualified nutritionist across the road from me and I have an appointment to see her Monday next week. Hopefully I can change my diet following some professional advice, to help my body work more effectively – and re-instate a more robust immune system than the ridiculous current one I am stuck with.

I guess the other thing this could be is my 4 – 5 year “sick period” that I get – that after its passed I don’t get sick again for years. That would be great if it was the case, as long as this was my last illness for 2 – 3 years.

I am basically back into it now. I got through 5 training sessions last week and have started strong this week, I’ve done 3 sessions already and its only lunch Tuesday

Yesterday morning I went down to Mermaid Beach and had a surf with some of the guys. I was out in really nice and clean 2′ conditions for about 90 minutes. I tell you, it is amazing how much you can pick up in a session like that. I kid you not, if I had have had a dozen such surf sessions in the last 3 months leading into the Gold last year – my event may have had a different result. Very positive and encouraging. I can’t wait to get back out there.

This morning I had my first ski session back after about 6 weeks off. In challenging 4′ conditions too – not the best day to start back. Anyway, I got out ok, thanks to a big lull and spent a bit of time out the back. Coming back though, I missed the wave I was hoping for, then found myself in the impact zone – BOOM!! I was smashed – so had a nice swim session in there too. Other than that, we had some great white water practise – all important surf experience.

And I just went for a 6km run. Over the last 4 weeks or so I have been getting my legs used to the Newton runners. I think they are pretty good now. I ran the 6kms with no twinges or soreness at all. Cardio wise, I am still a bit under par. I clocked 29 mins 56, my average heart rate though was 176 and max was 185. This is high for what really is a flat and easy route. Compared to this time last year though – I am a much fitter man. This is an excellent base for an assault on my 2011 events - it is going to be my year of revenge!!

Well, I am slowly getting back into training. 2 weeks ago I had 2 training sessions, last week I had 3. I want to get 4 in this week, it could be hard though given Christmas. Then next week, hopefully 5 and after that, back training pretty much every day.

I am starting to see I have some real challenges ahead of me for 2011. Home life is going to get very busy. I have:

• A new child due at the end of January
• A wedding to plan and finance
• Ross coming over from Africa for 2 weeks in August
• A rapidly growing business

to name some of my commitments. I am certainly required to spend more time at home, helping around the house now, than I was expected to a couple of months ago. With 5 weeks left in her pregnancy, Moana really needs my help. So I am planning to try and line up most of my training sessions early in the morning. Try to make all of them quality and at least an hour and a half. Combinations will be required too. Put different disciplines in the same training sessions. Like I can go for a 30 minute run in the sand prior to board paddling etc.

Anyway – lets see how we go over the coming weeks. The aim is to be solidly back into it by the second week of new year