Hola mis amigos!

I’ve just seen the weather forecast for next week in the UK and the enthusiasm I had for the Christmas week kind of took a toppling. -10 degrees in London, -20 degrees up north. Even the Brownlees looked a little pissed.

I’m out in La Santa, Lanzarote at the moment with many of the British team as we try and get into gear to lay down some work for 2011. It’s been a pretty successful set-up , fairly December-like, and although I have had a few ‘bang my head against the wall’ moments – they have been rare and mostly about being tired more than anything else. We have been graced with the gorgeous presence of Matilda Sophia Don and her mummy Kelly who have been a wicked distraction to training (and evidently writing blogs ). She did her first 400m round the track at 9 weeks but is now been strongly coerced towards tennis or golf by her dad.

Most of the work has been fairly simple same-as-ever solid training, do the distance, work hard, go home. I have missed out on a couple of karaoke nights with the Leeds gang but I think us oldies will join them on Saturday for a Christmas send-off. I need to do a duet with Holly as I’ve heard she has an amazing voice … we were thinking of ‘Big Ego’ by Beyonce (not related to anyone here on camp, promise Guesses on Twitter.

The best thing on camp so far I think may have been mine and Helen’s ‘jinxed‘ attempt to chase Adam Bowden down up Tabayesco … we would have made it if her pump hadn’t fallen on the last switchback. We were close. I think you can tell from this exciting story how thrilling times in Lanzarote have been!

The best story on camp is from little Johnny Brownlee on our run yesterday. He told me he and his big bro came to get me and Anneliese Heard’s autograph at the Nationals in Salford in 2000. Liese was in a grump ‘cos she had been second so the boys were a little scared and Al too shy to ask so brave Johnny had to do it haha!! Apparently my autograph had a smiley face so was their favourite … how sweet is that… Al was 12 and Johnny was 10. They are both still stunningly cute and Al seems to have lost some of his shyness

Seriously, there has been a lot of time for reflection out here and my eyes have been opened to the risk of brain malfunction by a few conversations I’ve had. I really don’t want this to happen to me and thus need to get my brain back in gear. I think it’s time to start using my brain fibres before triathlon talk takes hold. I don’t mean coaching or blogging by the way, they count as triathlon spin offs. I’ll have you know I used to be fairly intelligent Maybe some serious writing may be the way forward … hold that thought … I’ll see what I come up with.

Race season planning hasn’t been confirmed for me yet and I’ll talk it through with Brett very soon and let you all know. Meanwhile I’m going to South Africa on Boxing Day to get back up to speed and take on 2011. New Year’s resolutions won’t be triathlon based this year because I’m finally happy with my set up. Maybe I’ll just stick to the old ones; I must stop spending money on shoes I can’t walk in (I bought some amazing gold KG ones at the airport but I don’t think the discotheque here can really justify them), I must be more tidy (not gonna happen), I must be more tolerant (probably not gonna happen), I must not fall for inappropriate men… Haha!

Happy Christmas dudes, enjoy xx