Personal Bests & Piccolos

Nicholas Hull
Apr 24, 2017
3 min read

There is an ongoing joke in the Hull family household about the correct use of the word irony but I think I have just stumbled across the perfect definition:

Sitting down to write a new post that has coffee as part of the title when I have just made it through an entire week and counting without a single coffee.

By no means is this a long term decision to oust coffee from my diet and I don't envisage it will last long at all but after a few terrible nights sleep, caffeine was the first obvious trial expulsion. When you finish an FTP test one evening and your legs are still shaking well beyond the time you stopped pedaling but you're awake until all hours of the night, something's not quiet right! Coffee will definitely be back so the title sticks and it is just taking a brief absence for the time being.

I knew that the Personal Best brand wouldn't stay quiet for very long, heck, it has been a brand that I have built up over the past four years and I'm certainly not ready to let that go just yet! After only three weeks I have found a new venture and hobby to pursue but one of the hardest parts has been coming up with a catchy name that incorporated Personal Best. After lots of deliberation I decided on Personal Bests & Piccolos.

I've always enjoyed the concept of blog writing and have found it a really useful way of honestly evaluating my race performances and looking for areas of improvement. There are only so many times I can race so the dilemma became, how can I use this blog outside of the races?

To be honest the general concept was and will remain very simple - I have a real passion for this sport, sports science and seeing how far I can push my personal best. When you combine all of that and the enjoyment I get out of writing, why not share it all with an audience?

There's glamorous and there's not so glamorous aspects to this sport and the lifestyle that accompanies it and I want to explore all of them. The glamorous is finishing one of those tough training sessions or days and knowing the snacks or rest day adventures that follow. On the flip side, there's nothing very glamorous at all about at FTP Test when 20min feels like an eternity but the sports science that accompanies it is fascinating.

We have so much data, technology and media available to us that the possibilities about what I can share are endless. I don't think I can pinpoint the exact direction these posts will follow but a paragraph in a book I've been reading recently summed it up perfectly.

"If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started 'being creative,' well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are."

There's no time like the present and when I already have a few ideas jotted down as drafts, Personal Best & Piccolos is off to a rolling start and gathering momentum as I type. So grab yourself a piccolo and enjoy the personal bests that will follow.