If you go down to the woods today

Obviously a lot of my spare time is spent on triathlon, even more since I started writing this blog. So once the Saturday mornings exertions with EGTC are over the rest of the weekend is spent with the family. One of Mrs Trihard's favourite pastimes is Geocaching. Without going into too much detail Geocaching is essentially a giant treasure hunt using GPS devices to find small containers hidden around the world. You will have definitely walked past one without realising it, whether you live in the middle of a thriving metropolis or out in the country wilds. These are hidden by other Geocachers and range in size from tiny magnetic capsules, that can be put on the back of a street sign, to an ice cream box or larger hidden under foliage.

Mrs Trihard and Toddler Trihard scour the undergrowth for treasure
 But before you rush out from your office and start to rip up the street furniture outside I must add that it's not real treasure hidden in these magical containers. No it's usually a bit of paper you write your Geocaching moniker on to prove that you've found it. And then when you're able to, you log it on the Geocaching website. This is just in case your Geocaching peers don't believe you've just spent 20 minutes on your hands and knees, scrabbling in the mud, trying to avoid dog muck, sticking your hands amongst various tree roots searching for a piece of paper in an old camera  film case.

"So what the flip has this geekorama pastime got to do with triathlon?"  I hear you ask. Continuously running the same route can seriously damage your motivation to pull your trail shoes on. However Geocaching has helped me get to know a few different interesting routes, that I otherwise would not have known about, that I can easily introduce to my training. A lot of the time there will be a series of caches that someone has set up to introduce you to their favourite walk, typically along a loop. I have been blessed with a terrible sense of direction so being given the opportunity to properly scope out a running route first limits (although not completely eradicates) the possibility of me getting lost in the wilds of West Sussex and having to live as part of a pack of wolves for the next seven years.

Some of the routes I have discovered I can do directly from my house and others require a short car ride but I'm sure running a variety of routes will help stop me getting bored with my running routine for the coming months. And my first 10k is starting to sneak up, less than four weeks to go.

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