Name : Denis Oakley
Age :37
Where Are You From? : England
Currently Residing In… : Malaysia
What Do You Do For A Living? : I'm currently building Beyond Transition.com - a website providing the best race information in the world to Triathletes
AEW : Hey – thanks for doing this. I’m a triathlete myself and it’d be nice getting yet another POV about triathlons. So what got you started with doing the Tri?
DO : I fell in love and realized that if I was serious about wanting to spend my life with Senay I ought to make my life last as long as possible. Triathlon is a sport which you can do right into your 80's, or older, and so I took it up as it would provide long term health, which meant I'd spend more years with Senay
AEW: Awww.... How romantic! When was your last race? And how did you fare?
DO : Powerman Malaysia. I DNF'd. The bike fell on me as I was putting it into the car in the rain. Then I drove under a canopy and crunched the bike. Then it fell off the roof of the car as I was driving to the start; then I drove the wrong way down a dual carriageway, lost my timing chip, was on the toilet with food poisoning as the start gun went and gave up as I needed to vomit half-way through the bike leg. Never had quite so much go wry in one morning before - but it was probably for the best as I was mentally burnt out from training!
AEW: Oh my God! That is beyond Murphy's Law! Hey, I understand you have a job to pay the Tri bills :) And a kid too. How do you find the time to train?
DO : I work for myself and so fit working hours around wife and family and training. That said, I try really hard to do my training in the morning as there are always lots of reasons why it doesn't happen if I leave it till later in the day. I also have a treadMill and turbo on my balcony so I can do exercise and still be part of the family community.
AEW : Do you have any training tips for other budding triathletes out there?
DO : Spend more time training than talking about it. Spend money on your bod, not your bike. You are the engine that makes YOU go fast - not the new bike, or the cool shoes or..... you get my drift.
AEW : I get some of my training tips from magazines. Do you think those are helpful?
DO : Have a plan, be consistent and follow it for 12 months. Then you see what works for you. Tweaking the whole time makes it hard to spot what works for you.
AEW : Actually, I do stick to a plan. That's because I'm so stuck with my routine that I just hate changing it. Well, apparently, it is working! I do hope to do an Ironman someday SOOON. But every time I finish a Tri – and that is only the Olympic distance ones – I feel pretty daunted – 3 hours seems grueling enough. I’m not sure 17 hours would kill me or not! Any advice?
DO : The scariest bit is signing up. I was scared shitless the first triathlon I signed up for, and then it took me a long time to press the submit button on Ironman Langkawi in 2008. Once you've done that you're committed.... Then it comes down to a job that you have to do. So break it up in to blocks, put the required effort into your training sessions, and see how you feel when you cross the finish line.
AEW: Tell me more about your Tri website which you started. What’s the website aiming to do?
DO : Beyond Transition is all about races. It's going to be something special for everyone who does triathlons. I got frustrated at not knowing about races and then struggling to find information about the race. What we're doing is talking to race organisers and getting the best information available about the race. Some of this is the same as you get on the race website, but we're intending to add loads more than this - we're still finalising the details with some people so i can't say too much more right now.
Basically you should feel like you've had a chat with someone who has done the race a dozen times when you look at one of our race pages. To start with we're getting a few hundred of the world's top triathlons onto the site - but over the next year or so we expect that we'll end up covering about 3000 races.
We're working on some other cool stuff as well - which we hope is going to be ready by the time the website launches in January. Meanwhile, we have our facebook page up already and Emma Bishop our race correspondent is covering some of the best triathlons around the world. She was in Hawaii for the World Championships and is off to Phuket in Thailand for the Asia 70.3 Championships and then forwards to the Laguna Phuket Triathlon next weekend.
AEW : I want HER job! Lastly – if you were to shout something to all triathletes out there right now – what would it be?
DO : if you don't love every minute of your training and racing, take a break. It's easy to overdo it and burnout. Make sure you recover properly
AEW : And Denis - Good Luck to you too! Thank you very much for sharing with me today. Much appreciated!
To the rest of you triathletes - whether amateur or veteran - do check-out Beyond Transition for your triathlon needs!
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