I am back!
After a bit of hiatus from regular substack uploads, I am back!
The last few weeks have involved a good block of training as I build early season, a fair amount of driving between Mount Maunganui (home) and Taupo – 3 trips down and back in recent weeks, more progress and decision making on the house renovations, finalising sponsorship partnerships for the year and of course time with family and friends around training when possible.
I decided to take a bit of a break from writing on here while I was sorting out some sponsorship contracts and agreements, which took up a bit of time around everything else.
As part of that, I am excited to announce that I will be working with Calley Homes again for another year. I love being able to represent a local brand to Mount Maunganui and work with a company that shares similar values of building towards excellence. Calley Homes is going to be showcasing some of their work via my newsletters, sharing snippets of our beautiful part of the world and projects they are working on, and providing some inspiration for us all.
I’m also going to be continuing my partnership with TriKai for 2025. TriKai is a NZ based nutrition distributor, founded by an aspiring triathlete Bailey Powell. TriKai is a great source of nutritional needs for NZ based athletes with lower shipping costs than many overseas based distributors, and who doesn’t want to support the local guy over the big companies?!
And my partnership ASICS New Zealand continues into 2025 also. I have been using ASICS for a few years now and love the huge range of shoes available. My current models on rotation are the Novablasts 5s, Evoride’s, and my race shoe for the next two races will be the MetaSpeed Edges.
In addition, have a new apparel sponsor on board for 2025, FUSION clothing. FUSION is a Danish brand that specializes in the production of high-quality sportswear specifically for triathlon, cycling and running. I’m excited to work with this brand for 2025 and beyond. Stay tuned to see some more of the new gear (and new race suit!) soon.
Meanwhile my partnerships with ANZCO Foods and MitoQ continue on as well (they are midway through their terms)!
So just like that, we are now a little over 1 week away from Geelong 70.3 and a little over 3 weeks from T100 Singapore. It is crazy how fast these races have snuck up.
Training has been going well so far this year with very few setbacks along the way. I’ve had some occasional tired training days (as expected), but thankfully I haven’t needed to adjust my training much at all in this build. My total volume of hours per week over the last 6 weeks has averaged out to be around 25 hours a week, with some up over 27 hours.
We have been adding in more speed work into my running which has been enjoyable, and as a result running is feeling the best it has in a long time. Some of my favourite run sessions have involved “progressive 1kms”, where I do a series of 1kms as 800m a little faster than 70.3 pace, into 200m faster. For me, this might look like 800m at 3:40min/km pace into 200 at 3:20min/km, with easy jogging in between. The session is solid but still in control and not to exhaustion. I have been finding building the number of reps per weeks to be quite fun and rewarding to see and feel progress across the weeks. Hopefully this shows in these first two races coming up!
Thanks for reading and I’ll be back post-Geelong with a debrief.
If anyone is going to be at these next two races, I hope to see you there!
Till next time..