The winning edge
02nd July 2018 - 20:23
Back in September last year we ran a competition with 220 Triathlon magazine to celebrate the launch of the our new website.
The prize was a season’s worth of coaching with Triathlon Coaching UK and out of the hundreds of entries 200 received, Nic Lydford, was selected at random as the winner.
Nic, a computer programmer, lives in Southampton with his wife and their two children so he knows all about the stresses and strains of fitting training sessions around both his work and social calendar.
Over the last few months, he’s been training hard under Matt Sanderson’s expert guidance and has completed the Fareham Sprint triathlon in April where he placed 10th in his age group.
Comments Nic: “I’ve always enjoyed swimming, cycling and running but I’d never really considered signing up for any professional coaching. My brother is always challenging me to do races with him but I’ve usually made excuses not to join in so winning the competition gave me the support I needed to set some specific race goals and create a bespoke training programme to enable me to reach them.
“Since I’ve started training with TCUK, my run times over 5 and 10km have come down and I’ve learnt how to swim more than 25m front crawl. I really like the routine that the training plan provides me with - it’s great to have a structured plan in place. Getting weekly feedback from Matt is very beneficial and I now fully understand why the pros all have coaches!
“The other part of my prize was a six-week nutrition course with TCUK’s nutritionist, Jon Hodgkinson, founder of Real Food Func. This was very interesting for me and keeping a weekly food diary, plus chatting through my food choices and how to fuel training with Jon, was insightful. He also gave me lots of healthy new recipes to try out which the whole family all enjoy.”
Concludes Nic: “My next race is the Guilford triathlon in July and I’ll be doing a half marathon at Goodwood with my brother in October. I’m also using these races to raise money for Cerebral Palsy so if anyone would like to sponsor me, please click the link below!”