Bluer Pastures!!

It has been about two weeks since my last blog and In that short period of time things have changed dramatically in both my sport and my life.

For starters the team which I have trained and competed with for the past 2 years Liquidworx/ Fitscience I will no longer be racing with. I left the team back in September in search of a bluer pastures and turned to Ballina CC the local club based in my home town. I will be competing next year with Ballina CC and with the way my training is progressing things could be very interesting. My choices for changing were very much based on the fact that I wanted a bit of a change and I am keen to help bring on and develop bike racing in the local town and being a member of the local club is simply the logical choice. Also I generally always take a few wins each year and doing so in Ballina CC colors will be a great boost to the club. Since there is already a well established group of riders currently present there including the man who has aided me to most of my greatest results, my brother Ciaran "The Eagle" Clarke it will be great to get mixed in among them and see how we get on. A big thanks to Liquidworx/Fitscience who took care of me for the past 2 years.

I wont be going into any depth on my training and development over the past 2-3 weeks only on the note that I successfully completed the Killary harbour swim of 4.2km in 1hr 23mins. Now this is by no way a superb time but since I only really had a month of prep I'm pretty happy with how I got on. I think I am going to be cutting slowly back on the swimming as I am putting away substantial time away in both the gym and out on the road.

I suppose I best get to the next big change which is comes in the form of my job. Whilst on the team over the past two years I had been working in Fitscience Bicycle shop both on the retail side and the clinical side running the Wattbike sessions and administering coaching programs to athletes. But I have decided to make a change and have returned to Functional Fitness where I will be advancing the spin program and slowly gathering experience to do some work in the other areas of the studio. I worked In Functional Fitness over 2 years ago and truly enjoyed the experience, so to be back is a good feeling. I will be doing all my own personal Strength and Conditioning work in the Functional Fitness where I have structured progressive plan in place to prepare my legs for the road in 2016. A big thanks to Fitscience & James Geraghty of Molloys Lifestyle Pharmacies for past 2 years.

To finish things off I am also back in education 1-2 weekends a month for the next 2 years. When it comes to health and fitness it is a never ending learning process and Im working hard on keeping ahead of the curve, Ill go into more detail on this in future blogs but for now that is it.

(Come 2016 hopefully we will see some serious action, Above stage 2 Ras Mumhan "Line out")

Keep it lit!!