Will Clarke's Blog by Will_Clarke

The next quarter while I’m living in Australia doing my "winter training", it is very much the same week in week out for me. If I come on here and start rattling off tales of how exciting my life has been this week, then to be honest I'm not doing my job properly. And soon you won't hear from me because I'll inevitably have had a rubbish year and I'll be culled from the realbuzz.com Celebrity Blogs section! So I'm taking a break from talking about myself this week and instead I want to introduce you all to the most important member of my team. Please meet my wife Clare. We've been together for 11 years and married for just over a year. We met at secondary school in Cambridge where I asked her if she'd like to go out with me at the leavers’ ball on the very last day!

My career hadn't started then and Clare didn't have a clue what Triathlon was. Fast forward to today and she's one of the most important people in my life. She knows almost everything about Triathlon, to the point where she'll give coaching a go from the sidelines. She's in charge of keeping our lives together during a hectic lifestyle, including admin and organisation. She also sorts out our nutrition and is in charge of keeping us healthy. And she has temporarily put her career on hold to support us on our pursuit of an extremely challenging goal. It may seem from the outside like a very cushy lifestyle for Clare, and yeah it definitely has its perks. She's travelling the world, living 3 months of the year on the Gold Coast, walking around with a healthy tan, watching races and not necessarily working in the conventional sense.

But I have to say what you see from me during the race weekend and from Clare supporting from the sidelines, is just the tip of the iceberg and behind closed doors, it is a very different story! In most respects an athlete’s partner has to be just as talented as the athlete themselves. They have to live through all the same stresses and have to sacrifice a huge amount of their lives which would sometimes be more desirable. They have to be amazing counsellors, picking up the pieces after every disappointment. They help us through the constant highs and lows and mood swings that are so frequent when training and racing. And even though they're not even competing themselves, they end up becoming incredibly involved whether they like it or not.

I have to say, I wouldn't want to go on this crazy journey alone and I feel very lucky to have a wife that loves me no matter what. And even though I don't show it all the time, I appreciate everything Clare does for me. So I'd like to raise my Multipower bottle and salute all the wives and husbands out there who are so committed and relentless in support of their other halves - trust me, we couldn't do it without you.