Three weeks

Time flies and my blog has been sitting neglected since February I see. Not that I haven't been busy (I have!) or haven't been writing (sadly more for other sites/forums than this one, not to mention micro-blogging on Twitter), but it would seem I haven't created a proper habit of posting to my blog and therefore it goes undone.

Habits take three weeks to form, so we're told. In fact, I've informed my new husband that he needs to wear his wedding ring for at least three whole weeks before he's allowed to decide it's too uncomfortable for daily wear. So in that spirit, today marks day 1 of my attempt to make blog-posting a regular habit again. Every day for three weeks I will post something! Some longer and more detailed than others, but at least something every day.

To remind myself, here's what I need to catch up on:
-- race reports
-- training camp in Lanzarote
-- PMC/FTP/CTL and other assorted acronyms
-- more race reports
-- my new TT-turned-road-bike
-- plans for the season
-- race reports!

And oh yeah, I got married on April 7.

Kona-bound!

Tomorrow we're headed for Kona, an 20-hour flight from the UK with one stopover on the way. We'll arrive there at 8pm where it will feel like 8am to our GMT brains and bodies... ugh.

But I'm finally just about packed and getting quite excited about going. Hot weather, bright sunshine, new sights to see and food to eat. And the race of course! No matter what happens, you only do Ironman Hawaii for the first time once, so I'm looking forward to a great day.

The TrainingPeaks folks recently asked if I'd like to be featured on their blog and of course I said yes. The timing couldn't be more perfect as I didn't have time to write a proper post for my own blog this week. So for anyone who wants to know more about me, my background and why I do triathlon (plus some insights to what I'll be doing next season), check it out!

Next post from Hawaii with pics!

Velonews.com and my foray into journalism

After my post about Theo Bos and the Tour of Turkey crash (mostly my translation of his version of the events), Velonews.com contacted me to ask if they could use it on their site. I said no problem, and also mentioned that I liked to write other stuff too -- so should they by chance have something else they wanted covered, to let me know!

Sure enough, Tom Boonen's cocaine bust happened about a month later, but much of the media coverage was in Dutch of course. Velonews asked me to put together a little article summarising the Belgian media's handling of this fall from grace by Belgium's biggest sports star. I found a couple of interesting articles including this interview with Quick Step team manager Patrick Lefevere, and wrote a piece about it last weekend. The following Tuesday I was quite pleased to see it on the Velonews site with me listed as a "London-based journalist"!

The article is here for those who haven't seen it yet. Pretty cool to see my name in print like that, and hopefully it won't be the last time either. My love of writing has been rediscovered and rekindled over the past few months with my regular posts to this blog, making me think I should take it a bit more seriously and write more in general. It would be nice to carve out a little niche on the side, but even without a paycheque I've been enjoying putting thoughts on paper again for others to read.