Donabate parkrun takes place at Newbridge House & Farm. It’s a beautiful country house and the drive in passes a ruined tower, plenty of trees and open grass. The house looks lovely from the front (see below) but not quite as nice from the side (see above). The run is one large lap and then one shorter lap so you don’t repeat too much. There is a nice cafe for on-site snacks after the run, too ..read more

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life is an inspiration-style self-help book by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is part auto-biography with each rule taken from his life and illustrated by the success it brought him. The rules are typical for what you would expect in this kind of book: set a vision and work your arse off to get it. But Schwarzenegger places an emphasis on humility and listening, documenting his failures as much as his successes. For example, he hates the term “self-made man” because it ignores all of the people who helped him. There is a dichotomy in the message. You have to ignore the na ..read more

Counselling Adolescents: The Proactive Approach is a textbook on youth counselling by Geldard & Geldard. It’s one of the classic textbooks on counselling young people. It’s an interegrative counselling philosophy. There are bits of SFBT, Person-Centred, Transactional Analysis, psychodynamic and behavioural approaches in here. It’s also a little dated but not out-of-date. That said, I didn’t find it quite as useful as many of my colleagues have ..read more

Last weekend I went to River Valley parkrun. It is a lovely course: two laps of the park including running along thw stream in the middle of the park. There is a hill but it is nothing compared to Temple Newsam. I hadn’t run since Westport marathon so I was pretty pleased to be just over 26 minutes. This one takes me to 348, so only two to go until the next unofficial milestone. I did get sunburnt, though! It hasn’t stopped raining since October and at 9:30 am I managed to catch the sun ..read more

Sean Conway is an ultra-endurance athlete. But he is also a pretty normal guy. Until 30 he was a photographer before deciding his life as boring and quitting to do cool stuff. He cycled around the world, completed a triathlon along the entire British coastline and last year set the world record when he completed 105 full distance triathlons in 105 days. The talk was him telling his life story which was highly entertaining. Plus I got a signed book. If you like following this kind of thing, Sean said Jonas Deichmann is going for 120 triathlons this year. Sean and Jonas have been friends since ..read more

We went to Westport last weekend. It wasn’t the stunning success we hoped for. The idea was to get there in plenty of time and have some exploring time on Friday. But it took 5.5 hours to drive across the country meaning we were not there until late and was late to bed. In the morning I did the marathon and recorded my first run DNF. I wasn’t in a great state by the time I got back I had a shower, changed and went down to collect my bag. But then we got hit by another rain storm and got soaked again. We went to the beach on Sunday but it was freezing. Then we headed over to Croagh Patrick fo ..read more

I booked this race a while ago as a chance to take a trip to Ireland’s west coast. Then I picked up an injury and haven’t run much for the past two months. Still, I was armed with some good distance in me and sign-off to run from two physios. I actually suggested I should skip it but they said it would be fine: must be the first time a phyio has talked a runner into running! The race starts in the quay and takes in a two laps of the green way before heading out along the coast road. The course is described as having some hills but probably nothing that counts as a hill in Yorkshire. There was ..read more

In 2018, I launched my course Triathlon For Beginners and subsequently set up a Facebook group to facilitate peer support. Six years later and I am pleased to announce the group has now hit 100,000 members. My Running For Beginners group did the same in January. I have some battle stories from what spammers will try in a group that size . But it has been wonderful to watch so many people sharing stories, encouragement and support ..read more

With Storm Kathleen sweeping over our islands I wasn’t sure what parkruns would be on. There was a nervous wait from 8:00 to 8:30 as I refreshed all of the Facebook pages hoping to see someone would confirm their parkrun was on. Royal Canal parkrun were the first to confirm so was delighted to join them. The course is an out-and-back that starts from the town centre. It is pan-flat with no locks on the course. I set off thinking I would not be able to match last week’s time, especially as there would be more of a headwind coming back. But as it happens, I managed to set another walking PB of ..read more

I’m a British Triathlon certified strength and conditioning coach and I teach a course on using bodyweight exercises to build strength that you can do at home. It has been available via the Resilient website for a while but yesterday it became available on Udemy, too ..read more