A girl always involved in sport, certainly. However up until a few years ago my love for all things active shall we say, took a couple of slightly different forms...
For many years I was a swimmer with a lot of my childhood memories formed in the essence of chlorine.. niceee! From the age of eight to fifteen I swam competitively at county and regional level meaning galas and open meets filled many a weekend. We didn't half travel a bit, my mom and I. No reliance on the Sat Nav back in the early noughties that was for sure! In those early years sweets and a Red Bull was the energy fuel of choice. Sport was so simple ;) Years before quitting swimming in my late teens I used to run at a local athletics club where by senior school I was made to choose between athletics or swimming nationally in a development squad. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen I competed for the squad, swimming some mad hours each week at a silly time most mornings before school. As a result I did qualify for the national championships but unfortunately at the time I never actually took part in them, managing to become over-trained and contracting glandular fever. Priorities changed from then on with me starting out in events with peculiar names such as aquathlon and triathlon. This change in direction brought around quite a few successes regionally and landed me a fifth ranked spot nationally during my time as a youth athlete. However there was something niggling in the back of brain telling me that even as a triathlete, all this swimming was becoming a bit of bane. By this point, I'd already dabbled in a bit of cycling, gaining myself a silver at a national event in a discipline I never knew existed the year beforehand! (hint hint, image below) From 2011 I called myself a fully fledged cyclist and have never looked back since...
L to R: Me, Hannah Barnes, Penny Rowson, National Cyclo Cross Championships 2010.
Junior Women, Sutton Park.
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