Who am I?

Hello and welcome to JAG Triathlon Basics! I’m from Oxford in the UK and am now living just outside Bangkok in Thailand, where I’ve been living and working since December 2010.

I have always been a keen sportsman with my top sport being football. However, after suffering a quite bad knee injury in March 2007 I was forced to give up playing and focus on two other sports I was really into, cycling and running.

So I was always really into cycling and running, but had never been a keen swimmer! I have memories of when I was a kid being taken to swimming lessons and school and being made to sink to the bottom to pick up a brick, which I could never do.

I used to dread these days and would quite often try and find some way of getting out of going! Swimming was just something I’d occasionally do at the seaside or on holiday.

After coming to Thailand I was faced with very different scene. It was hot, crowded and not really suitable to cycling or running around the city centre.

If anyone has been to Bangkok you’ll know what I mean! Therefore, initially I just signed up to a gym in order to keep fit, and would mainly join spinning classes or do different workouts on the treadmill.

In May 2013 I moved into a house which my girlfriend (now wife!) and I bought together. This was in an area just outside of Bangkok called Rangsit.

I would still go to Fitness First and regularly join the spinning classes and running. After around 3 years of doing this it started to get a bit boring so I was looking for something else to do.

Being a bit more out of the city, it was more suited to being able to cycle and run outside, so in March 2017 I decided to buy a bike.

As I wasn’t thinking of taking up anything too serious, and with the roads being not particularly well maintained, I chose to buy a hybrid bike, something that had slimmer tyres and weighed less than a full mountain bike, and provided a bit more stability that a full road bike.

The model I opted for was a Giant Escape. Here’s picture of my buying the bike!

I started just going around some local roads and quickly realised that the cars, buses and tuk-tuks weren’t the problem now, only the famous Thai Soi Dogs!