What Inspires You?

Everyone has something that inspires them, or drives them to achieve a fitness goal. Some people enter long distance running races, to earn sponsorship for a charity close to their hearts, having never run further than the end of their gardens before. Some people have weight-loss goals, and find a love of fitness this way.

The latter is vaguely true for myself, but I am also inspired by the people around me. I have several friends who have found a love of running, since becoming parents and wanting to do something for themselves again.

My husband is a very big inspiration. He has always kept fit, going to the gym several times per week and commuting to work on his mountain bike, fifteen miles each way, even in inches of snow!

This year, I made a bit of a light-heated comment to him; while we watched the triathlon events on channel 4, about how great he would be at triathlons. He took me seriously and started running for the first time in his life and swimming. He has never been a natural swimmer and still can't swim front crawl.

In September 2010, he entered his first Olympic-distance triathlon, in Roundhay Park in Leeds. He swam 1500 metres in the lake, which also happened to be his first ever open water swim and the first time he had worn a wetsuit. He swam the full mile using breaststroke. He completed the 40k cycle (which to be fair, was a walk in the park to him). And then he ran 10k. He finished about 160th out of 300 competitors. I should point out he works full time and is a full time father to four, so his achievements are extremely impressive!

Since the race, he has taken to running in his lunch hour, at work, to simply keep fit, now the triathlon season is over. He regularly runs 15 miles over lunchtime, having cycled 15 miles to work that morning, and later cycling 15 miles home again.

So yeah..... I don't have to look far to find my inspiration....

I took a few photo's of the triathlon, thought I would share some here. (Taking photo's at such an amazing event inspired me further to consider pursuing my newly found interest in capturing the action at amateur sporting events.. but that's an entirely different story ;-)

Oh and he intends to enter the Great Swim Series with me in 2011 :-D










Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, the full set of photo's are available there... what an amazing day... it will stay with me for a long time for many reasons. One of those being that I came away from it, knowing I would *do* something else. At first i thought it was along the lines of photography, and most likely, this will follow. In fact, I decided not too long afterwards, that I would cycle more next year and I would swim. My hubby is a huge inspiration, but one day at a triathlon event (that he happened to be competing in!) also inspired me in many ways.