“What training plan have you been using for your half-iron tri? I need a recommendation.”

“Training plan. Umm, I haven’t really got one.”

“Oh, have you been using a coach?”

“No, none of those either.”

“Then how do you know how much training to do?”

“Well, I haven’t exactly been training either. Not in the conventional sense.”

“Well, OK, good luck with your race then.”

This is a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago. I am the party without a coach, training plan or traditional notion of what ‘training’ for a half-iron triathlon means. Instead of training, I’ve been ‘preparing’ for my race, which has involved swimming, cycling and running, but in a more relaxed, unpressured and unmeasured sense than you’ll see many triathletes adopt.

Months ago when I signed up for The Gauntlet, I asked my triathlon guru Katie, to recommend a plan. She’d used Don Fink’s Be Iron Fit in the past and while this is a full-iron programme, the plan includes a half-iron tri part way through. The idea was to follow the plan as far as the 70.3 with a bit more of a taper.

I read the book. I copied out the plan. I stuck it on my wall. And then I never looked at it again. Me and the plan didn’t get on. It wanted me to go for a run when I wanted to go swimming. It wanted me to rest when I wanted to cycle into work. And it wanted me to do a three-hour cycle when I’d planned on cycling 90 miles from London to Peterborough in search of beer.

I was burned out from training for Manchester marathon. I didn’t want to run. So I swam more, cycled every day and forgot about my running shoes for a while. It told me to do certain swim workouts, but I was still working on being able to swim without stopping. It told me about heart rate zones and paces when I just wanted to plod along on my bike, forget my watch when I was running and learn to love swimming outside.

As the weeks went by I trained less and less but my amount of activity went up. Most days I was either cycling 10 miles to commute to work and back, splashing about in a pool or reservoir, heading to a yoga class or doing some sort of relaxed running. I clocked up a lot of events too, the Ride 100 cycle, a couple of half marathons and some swim races. None of it, though, felt like training because I was doing it, not because a plan on my wall told me to, but because I wanted to.

I switched between the three sports when I felt like it, so none of the three ever got tiresome and I looked forward to doing the other two while I was doing the other.

Triathletes are a bit obsessive to say the least. From training to nutrition to equipment, there’s a lot of elements that can be measured, analysed and obsessed over. I don’t want to go down that road. It might make me faster or fitter, but would it make me a ‘better’ triathlete? Would it make me enjoy the sport more or would it just leave me anxious and stressed come race day? I took a wild guess and decided to leave all that to those in front of me in the race.

So now I’m a few days from my race and I’m reminded of the Matt Fitzgerald quote: “Above all else, training should make you feel prepared. If you feel prepared you are, if you don’t you’re not.” I feel prepared for the race through knowing that I’ve done enough swimming, cycling and running to cope with the distances. That’s not to say that the thought of doing them all at once doesn’t frighten me. It does.

But the fact that I have enjoyed every step, stroke and pedal of my preparation gives me confidence that on race day I can enjoy that too. Because 70.3 miles is an awfully long way to go if you’re not having fun. And if the worst happens and I have to DNF, I won’t feel the past few months have been wasted. Because every time to climbed on my bike or zipped up my wetsuit, I wasn’t doing it because of that one day in September. I was doing it because that’s what I wanted to do in that moment.