On the Blog again

Life has been very unsettled this month. The unexpected death of a very dear friend has put me, my family and my friends completely out of sorts and I certainly have not been up to writing a post on the blog. I feel that I have lived the last few weeks in a haze ; trying to keep up the routine of work, home life and running, finalising recipes for my new daily recipe feed on realbuzz.com and for the book, alongside ferrying the children about......doing all this whilst really constantly thinking of my wonderful friend and her grieving husband and kids.

But life must go on. This kids are back at school, the blog must be written!...and my late friend would not have wanted it any other way.

For this reason, my training for the Bristol Half Marathon has been rather half-hearted. I started the Summer with great ambitions of getting a really fast time in the 1/2. I am such a steady runner that my 1/2 marathon time is pretty similar t0 my 13 mile split in a full marathon. In theory I should be able to get round the course quicker. I have sped up slightly - managed to do 6 miles at 7.5 minute miles, but I am not sure whether I can keep up that speed for the full 13, especially as it is next week. But we'll see...

On a positive note, we had the most fantastic holiday in France and, back in the UK, my 15 year-old daughter did the South Coast Triathlon and won a medal for the fastest girl in her age group. I have to say that I was very, very proud. It was her first triathlon - a sprint triathlon (750M sea swim, 21k bike ride and 5 k run) in the foulest weather ever.

The sea look about as uninviting as it can get - rough, grey, big current. My daughter came a close fourth in the swim, despite the fact that she managed to swim out to sea in the wrong direction after about 500 metres (the kayak marshals managed to redirect her!)...and she was the only female without a wetsuit. The bike ride was through the driving rain and then to run 5k after all that...well, that takes some effort. It also takes some practice to swap from swimming kit to cycling to running kit, something that my daughter lost huge amounts of time on. Next time I will make sure she has the proper gear and a decent bike! Triathlons really do make pure runnning look like the easy option.

My husband, Mark, and Louis, our 15 year-old French exchange boy was also game enough to give it a go. Louis won the fastest boy in his age group as well. Well done to all of them!

Carbo-loading two teenagers is great fun, especially when they enjoy their food so much - copious amounts of lasagne, green tagliatelle with bolognaise sauce, chicken and chickpea pilau and flapjacks were eaten in the days leading up the the race, but I have to say that they both had trouble eating a good breakfast on the morning of the race. The nerves had kicked in and it was as much as I could do to get them to eat a bowl of cereal...We celebrated their success with a blow-out Indian meal at lal-jomi, our local Indian restaurant (the first taste of Vindaloo for french Louis...and he liked it!).