Quotes
Who's online
There are currently 0 users and 1 guest online.
October training
Lactate testing
Fitness From Africa is teaming up with Fitpro, a continued education college, and will be offering our Complete Athletic Conditioning course in conjunction with them. We will also be able to offer lactate and VO2Max testing, so please let me know if you would like more information on this.
FFA is moving!
Fitness From Africa will be moving to a new exciting venue in the New Year! We have earmarked a house still within the Lonehill boundaries and are looking forward to the opportunity to spread our wings in 2012.
We do have opportunity for other sporting professionals to operate from the venue, so if you are aware of a Biokineticist, chiro or dietician looking for a change, please spread the news! 
From the Two Oceans news desk:
Online entries for next year's ultra marathon open on 5 October 2011. The entry process has been split and participants will be able to enter online for the 56km ultra marathon only from 5 October. The 43rd event takes place on Easter Saturday 7 April 2012. Participants are encouraged to get their qualifying marathon done as soon as they can and to submit their entry to avoid disappointment.
The entries for the half marathon open on the 9th November, and it was revealed this week that there will be a brand new, One Ocean route! It's going to be a big one so don't forget to enter early!!
Races coming up
The RAC Tough One is around the corner and quite a few nice shorter distance events are on the offer. The Fitness From Africa Comrades and Two Oceans programs kick off officially on the 1st of December, so if you would like to do well at either or both of these, be sure that you are up and going by tthen! The Tough One is a good place to start, so get going and enjoy the fantastic weather in SA right now!
Complete Athletic Conditioning
The Complete Athletic Conditioning program is short study course for coaches, teachers, sports students, and fitness professionals working with athletes of varying abilities with the greater goal of performance improvement. Students who want to enrol for this course require a functional knowledge of human movement and anatomy.
Who should attend? In addition to general, all-round conditioning, Complete Athletic Conditioning is ideal for rugby, soccer, hockey, netball, sprinting, tennis, cricket, and most other racquet and team sports.
Our first triathlon
Olympic distance: 1,5km swim, 40km cycle, 10km run
After an annus horribilis in 2010 where I was diagnosed with breast cancer and my training partner had debilitating knee injuries, we needed a hard core challenge to confirm that we were back on track. We chose the Olympic distance Jo’burg City Triathlon on 25th September 2011 to celebrate both our recoveries.
It might have been easier to attempt the sprint distance first, but our celebration called for something extreme and “Olympic” had a nice ring to it. Though we have both been spinning at the gym for years, did some running and completed many open water swims, we had exactly 6 weeks to brush up on all three disciplines. And get used to a bike that is actually moving forward! And hold down jobs, manage families and fit in some sleep!
Luckily we had expert help in the form of our running coach Marcel at Fitness From Africa and Jennifer the fitness trainer (also fondly known as “Satan’s daughter” by her loyal clients) at Lonehill Virgin Active.
So it came that we stood in front of a very large expanse of extremely cold water in the form of the Victoria Lake in Germiston on Sunday morning 25th of September. We expected the water to be nippy for this time of the year, but after spending a lot of money on tri-suits and bikes, we decided to forgo the wetsuits till a next time.
We did not count on water temperature of 17 degrees! Of the 344 competitors, 71 were female and only 4 did not wear wetsuits. We were two of them. And as my friend’s daughter observed: the other two had far more natural padding than we had.
The problem with cold water is that it takes your breath away. By the time I could breathe again I was panting like an over excited hunting dog with not enough breath to breathe on both sides. OK, not a problem; I’ll breathe on one side. To my right I see Karin adopting the same life saving technique. This lasted fine till the group of fast men came surging past us. This disrupted my rhythm so badly that I had to switch to breast stroke.
With breast stroke you have little waves breaking in your face. Now the same water, which until fairly recently had a question mark regarding the e-coli content, was merrily splashing in my mouth.
I was only 750 m into the race and I had run out of swimming strokes. I was never good at butterfly and backstroke is for obvious reasons unpractical. I have to admit that there were desperate times when I was considered doggy paddle. Even panicky times when I looked longingly at the life savers on the paddle ski’s.
I suspect they were eyeing me like vultures to see when they should move in for the inevitable rescue. I don’t blame them; I was so cold that I struggled to make sense of my arms. And though I hate to admit it, there were even a few moments of raw panic when I wondered if I will ever reach the shore.
I have never felt so pathetic in my life. After 10 Midmars, the swim was supposed to have been the easy leg where we would have been able to surge ahead of the pack. The start to our very first triathlon was looking more like a lead balloon than a celebration.
With the swim thankfully finished I ran to get to the transitions area where my bike and hopefully trusted training partner, Karin, was waiting. The bike was there. Karin too, but she was shivering so badly that we had great difficulty talking to one another. It must have sounded like a dialect from Mars as we mumbled and gesticulated our way through a conversation.
You have never seen two people battle more to fit a pair of cycling shoes onto two feet. Karin had the one foot and I had the other, but the laces proved to be too tricky for our numb fingers. And her knees were shaking so badly that she had to sit down.
O my gosh, it must have been a sorry sight!
Karin told me afterwards that she saw her daughter amongst the spectators as she was racing from the dam to her bike. Instead of the usual wave, she stopped dead in her tracks in front of Samantha and then just stood there. Like a salt pillar. It was only when Samantha yelled: “Run, Mommy, run!”, that Karin galvanised into action.
It’s such a sad day when parents lose the plot!
OK, then we got on the bikes. The windbreaker I was wearing (which probably took me 5 minutes to get on with all the fumbling in trying to get frozen hands in sleeves and doing the zip) ballooned into a parachute as I rode and sounded like one too. People looked over their shoulders in sheer terror as I approached with an intimidatingly flapping noise.
Half way into the first lap of 10km Karin was yelling from the back, “Are we having fun?’ Unfortunately I was too unstable on the bike to take her out. It was only by the third lap that I thawed sufficiently to take the wind breaker off and probably doubled my speed without all the wind resistance. Then I started to enjoy it for the first time and those two laps of cycling was the only part of the @$%^*& triathlon that was fun.
Luckily we did not need to apply the last minute lessons we had in fixing a puncture, because that would have killed it for me.
Then we were ditching the bikes and preparing for the last leg of 10km run. And running was our best discipline of the three. We love running and even trained twice a week with a group on the track and another three times on our own for longer distances. It would have stood me in great stead if my legs were working though. Once you get off the bike, your lower body turns to jelly. My shuffle was reminiscent of “Loop en val- Motshwarateu” of the eighties except he was doing a 3min/km while I was topping six and a half.
We still finished in a much faster time than we anticipated. Just as well, as we initially aimed for four hours until we saw that four hours was the cut off time!
Will we do it again? Of course, but this time just way faster. A wetsuit would probably shave off 15 minute and without the windbreaker another 15…
The bug has bitten!
Anet Schoeman and Karin Carr
We have to run!!
Remember, every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether your a lion or a gazelle - when the sun comes up, YOU BETTER BE RUNNING! 
