Will Clarke's Blog by Will_Clarke

Happy Christmas everyone, I hope you all had a great few days celebrating. Personally I had a great Christmas; we hosted it this year up in our new house in Loughborough which was nice for a change. But it's a lot of work doing all the preparation, so hats off to all the mums out there doing the cooking for a whole family! I have to say it certainly was nice doing a Christmas back home in the UK. It's really not the same when you're in Australia without your family! A 30 degree Chrissy Day doesn't feel the same to me!

I'm pretty chuffed with myself this year because I had a great time and didn't miss any training at all! My rest day this week fell exactly on Christmas Day, so all I had to do was an hour's run, giving me maximum time with my family! A lot of athletes find Christmas quite a stressful period because it obviously massively breaks up the routine. When consistency is the key in sport it's kind of the last thing you need really but it has to be done! When your whole family is off work, eating, drinking and lounging around playing games, we still have to get out there in the cold and keep putting in the hours.

Holidays don't really happen in this job unfortunately! On Boxing Day I discovered a little gem of a race right here in my own village, the Boxing Day Barrow Handicap 10k! I thought I'd give it a shot as it would give me a good hard work out. I thought I would burn off some of the turkey and meet some of the locals. I didn't realise it at first, but I actually turned up to a fairly big event with 300 athletes and good organisation. The organisers did a great job in working out the handicaps for all of us based on the times we submitted and we set off in our waves.

I started on my own in the 30 minute wave and chased down the 300 people who set off in front of me. I didn't catch anyone until 25 minutes, but when I did, it was a constant stream of people including a snowman, an elf and 3 Spidermen! I ended up running 30:40 which wasn't too bad considering it was quite a hard, windy course and my body composition was 70% Turkey, 12% Chocolate, 8% champagne and 10% Sausage rolls! Happy New Year to everyone. I hope that everyone carves it up in 2012!