BRUNTY'S DIY TRI

Determined to keep himself entertained over the festive period, our weekened warrior fashioned his very own swim, bike and run...

- MARTYN BRUNT

I’ve done a triathlon! Not an actual one I grant you, but there’s about as much chance of finding an actual tri in Britain during the New Year as there is of me finding a pound in my bank account.

If I’d trained a bit harder in my younger days and earned elite status I could no doubt have sashayed off to Australia for the winter months and found races galore, and a whole bunch of new athletes to be beaten by. But no, I was too much of a laggard so I’m here, up to my knees in British floodwater, trying to be inventive and cobbling together my own events to keep myself entertained. So here’s what I did…

SWIM This year the Brunty Christmas was spent in Cornwall. The longsuffering Mrs Brunty is from near Falmouth and likes us to visit a few times a year to remind me what she gave up when she married me and moved to Coventry.

Being in Cornwall at Christmas meant of course a Christmas Day swim in the sea, and so it was that I joined members of my wife’s hessian-clad family to leap into the Storm Gerrit waves of Gyllingvase beach for a freezing plunge.