Another Ironman done, another plane journey endured, another year over and time for reflection on the past twelve months. No, this isn't going to be the musings of some professional athlete but a view very much from the other side of transition. A view of someone who actually gets paid to watch others racing around and tries to make some sort of sense of it all.

2008 started pretty much like 2007 did; Tri247 or, as we like to call it, Tri368 pretty much occupied all my waking hours and what little time was left seemed to be spent doing other triathlon-related things like helping out at Human Race events or doing the dutiful partner bit while Jen prepared for her Ironman season. There was, however, something new on the the horizon; doing live reports for the IronmanLive website for a handful of races up and down the prime meridian. I had already dipped a toe in the water at Sherborne in 2007 and had presumably made a decent enough job of it that Kevin Mackinnon was prepared to let me fly solo. Brave man...

After crewing for the Spring Ballbuster and the Breakfast Run it was a case of packing the bags, the faithful old Dell laptop and heading for South Africa. Years of travelling to the US on business meant that long distance travel was horribly familiar and an ability to pack light for trips was only enhanced by the fact that I was to be one of the very first passengers through Heathrow's shiny new Terminal 5. And, given the well-publicised problems of matching up people, planes and bags that meant carry-on only so it's a good job that these trips average out at four days and nights away. OK, so flying down (or up) the prime meridian to Jo'burg means losing a night each way but at least you get to arrive in a new hemisphere as dawn breaks and there's almost no time change which keeps things simple.

With the race being run by Triangle it was a foregone conclusion that the organisation would be spot-on but what I hadn't expected was the level of technology that they were throwing at it - or the sheer number of volunteers that were on the ground. Few races in my experience have been in the luxurious situation of having more people offer their help than they actually needed! For the IM Live coverage we need access to timing and a reliable spotter network - things that are not always easy to provide in remote locations with an unknown infrastructure. The SA crew did themselves proud with 3G equipped laptops at every aid station manned by students communicating with a central information room that was set up to feed me all the news via Skype. With that level of support, a media team headed by the ever-competent Gail Faiers and a timing crew from Australia who know the business inside out I was set for the day. What could go wrong...

...lots! Never, ever trust memory sticks that come from other people. Even with a fully up-to-date antivirus program my Dell got very sick indeed halfway through the morning. No problem, I'm sat in a cabin full of laptops - I'll just borrow one from the timing guys. No dice there because about 30 minutes earlier a camera motorbike had gone wide on the corner where the 30k timing point was and had wiped out the laptop that was sending back the data via 3G. No data lost but the machine I needed was being whisked out there to replace it. OK, so it's abandon my wonderful view of transition and the finish and back across the road to the media centre to use one of theirs. I never did see either Stephen or Bella finish until I watched the video some months later...

The abiding memory of the trip to South Africa, however, won't be of the race or even my first experience of the African environment but getting to meet and talk to a genuine triathlon legend; Mark Allen. Somehow I just hadn't expected that a man with such a history in the sport and such status would be as approachable and engaged with sharing his experiences for what must have been the 10,000th time. Pure class.

So, with race one under my belt it was down to the Apple Store to replace the Dell with a shiny, new and hopefully more virus-resistant MacBook and then, just a few weeks later, another flight back down south to Lanzarote. This time there was double duty to be done as Jen was racing at the same time as I was doing the coverage. We were there in 2007 and watched how Kevin did it and so the pattern was pretty much set for me to follow. The one problem with the island is that radio and mobile phone service is a bit patchy at times and so the spotter network was somewhat stretched to provide coverage. No problem, we had a secret weapon in the form of Jo, aka Blue Shark from the lake, who went out on the media boat and then covered the bike course by riding half the island before coming back to look after the run. She had been supposed to race but injury put an end to that - my good fortune, it has to be said. I covered the race in English and a very helpful student called Saray sat beside me all day doing the Spanish translations while Bob Foy delivered some cracking images - something that the South Africans had looked after for me. It's a full on job, this commentary...

And, because the media tent was literally next to the finish line, I did actually manage to get to see the race unfold and watch Bella make it two in a row. Jen had a good race too but sadly not fast enough for that long-awaited Hawaii slot. The Lanzarote experience is always special and that's undoubtedly due in no small way to the tremendous team that they have out there. Race Director Kenneth Gasque and the media team led by Isabelle Janssens along with the whole La Santa crew seem to leave no aspect of the race to chance. There can't be many other races where the top man personally welcomes every finisher across the line right up to the 17-hour cut-off.

Back to the UK for the main Human Race event of the year at Windsor, where I have the dubious honour of shepherding some 2,000 athletes into the river and starting them off at four minute intervals over two hours. We have pretty much got it sorted these days and despite all the usual dramas of people arriving late, changing waves because they can't tell one hat colour from another or just not bothering to read the instructions, we only had one wave start late and that by just five seconds. Life became a bit more complicated for the timing people though as someone managed to slice right through the main cable run when the finish gantry was moved into position and we couldn't run live as we had hoped. There's always something!

A week later and it was time to head south again, this time for Nice and Ironman France. In all my time covering the sport, and even when I was actually racing, I never managed to get to the legendary course and so this was going to be something special. It was another Triangle event so there was no doubt that it would be all well under control and there was the added bonus of being able to meet up again with Don Ryder, the Canadian commentator who is a walking encyclopaedia of the sport.

The weather was gorgeous, the organisation spot-on and the whole ambience of the event lived up to all my expectations. One thing that I had been told was usually a problem was that of communication as, like Lanzarote, the terrain down there isn't terribly radio friendly. I need not have worried! The crew had been out on the course and had tested all the available phone systems at pretty much every possible point on the bike course and we had a near-perfect information system all day. Ironically, we almost had too much data as the timing crew had one mat which was used twice on the bike - except that somehow everyone managed to forget that the second set of data would actually need somewhere to be collected... It's always the obvious that catches you out! It barely phased the joint French and Austrian crew and normal service was renewed in minutes.

Oh, and France was just the best finish line party and fireworks of the whole year. The whole place rocked with spectators, crew and pretty much all the pro athletes coming back to welcome home the last few athletes. The race has a 16-hour cut-off, most have the regular 17 hours, and there were some bitterly disappointed people who didn't make it in time. But, as they say, that's Ironman...

The end of June also saw a major change in my daily routine as, after 18 months in the saddle, I handed over the editorship to John Levison in whose capable hands the site now resides. After some eight years running the old Triathletes Homepage site and morphing that into Tri247 in January 2007 it was a bit of a shock to be able to start a day without actually having to be sitting in front of a computer! And, with only one weekend a month to look after it's rather worrying that my skills with Excel and massaging all the varying results formats to make them load into our database might actually start to go a bit rusty...

Just four weeks after Lanzarote and it was time to head for Switzerland. With blistering times the week before in Roth and Ironman Austria happening over the mountains at the same time, there was a lot of expectation that things could be interesting. The weather we had enjoyed at Nice was conspicuously absent; it poured all day Saturday while the standard distance citizens race was on and then poured most of Sunday as well. Zurich isn't a great place to be when it's raining - the mountains and the lake just seem to concentrate the effect.

Because we were based a fair way out of town I made arrangements to share a taxi in with a group of pro athletes who were staying in the same hotel. Problem #1 of the day was that the taxi never showed so we all piled into the regular bus which then took ages to crawl round all the other hotels collecting age groupers. IM Live normally goes on air with an update about an hour before the start - we still had one hotel to get to at that point and the pro athletes were getting just a little twitchy by then...

Tracking any race requires access to updates from spotters on the course and information from the timing systems - and after three pretty much faultless races in that regard it was a bit of a shock to discover that the timing-obsessed Swiss weren't going to be keeping me in the style to which I had become accustomed. The spotter channel was all in German (in which I'm singularly underwhelming) and the timing data was going via an external service with an apparently random update schedule. Probably the highlight (or should that be lowlight...) of the day was when we discovered that the motorbike-based GPS athlete tracking was a) going the wrong way at over 70kph and b) was following the 4th and 5th women rather than the 2nd and 3rd... By the time we got to the run course with its multiple dead turns it was clear that the best results were to be achieved by sticking a head out of the window and actually eyeballing the athletes as they went past the compound on each half of the loop.

One person who has to deal with all that the day can throw at them is Robbie Little of ASI who do much of the on-course photography at Ironman events. Robbie and his crew were at Zurich feeding us with their usual high quality images despite the miserable weather and light and when I saw him last that day he was trying to dry off before heading back to the States to cover Lake Placid the following weekend. When I caught up with him a few weeks later at Sherborne he told me that for Placid he had planned ahead and ordered up a big 4x4 to sit inside so he and his cameras could stay dry. Great idea, until he moved location which involved closing the tailgate. At that point several gallons of water, which had collected on the concave surface, promptly drenched him and all his equipment...

After a wet, weary and somewhat frustrating day in Zurich probably the brightest moment was hearing that the long-standing women's record had finally gone - to Sandra Wallenhorst on the other side of the mountains in Austria. And, of course, that Bella Comerford had also gone sub-9 to take second place which pretty much proves that she has no need of any lucky mascot, despite what John Levison claims!

August was a month off as far as Ironman racing went but there was the prospect of the Olympics and a couple of horribly early mornings to look forward to. As it turned out it would have been better to have stayed in bed and read the headlines or caught the race on the PVR. Afterwards I wrote an editorial on the subject and I think it currently holds the record for the most commented-on piece ever published on Tri247... The funny thing is, even after four months have passed, I still think the race was a poor reflection of what the sport could have offered.

And, with rain in prospect, where else would I be headed than Ironman UK in Sherborne. I think I've attended every one of the Sherborne events, both as a half-distance and as a full, and we've seen pretty much every weather type other than snow. This year the gods must have had a change of heart because the rain on Saturday didn't persist through the night although the clouds did mean that the hoped-for 6am start was never going to be on and it was 6:28 before the hooter finally went. Quite what it felt like bobbing around in that lake for half an hour in the dark I'll never know but Jen, who went spotting for me in the safety boat, took some pictures just to show how black it was out there. The start also suffered because of some supremely inconsiderate folk who decided that parking up on the run course and expecting to leave their cars there all day was an acceptable thing. Only in the UK... ...no, really!

Communications may seem to be a repeating theme in this article but, from previous experience, Sherborne's locality is about as radio friendly as Lanzarote - 1G is about the best you'll get out on the course. Which, in turn, makes it hard to get spotter reports after the first bike lap and so we knew we were in for a long day before we even started. In the end it came down to the efforts of just one man, Tri247 columnist Bob Holloway who, having raced the Viturvian on the Saturday, travelled down from Surrey to help us out on the bike and run. Bob, a thousand thanks would not be enough! At least this year we had managed to get ringside seats on the finish line thanks to the Tri- UK trailer - an impressive beast it is too. Warm and dry was a major improvement on 2007, believe me! As the race began to unfold we began to realise that the possibility of a Stephen/Bella double, an unprecedented double double, wasn't just a possibility but a very serious likelihood and things got very interesting indeed.

As we all know, the double happened and by some stealthy tactics we managed to convert the Tri-UK trailer into a bit of a refuge for the happy couple - amazing what the offer of a cup of tea will get you! It was quite funny watching the rest of the media trying to figure out where Stephen and Bella had slipped away to for a bit of peace and quiet and we did get a cracking interview with them as a bonus.

With my IM Live duties done for the year there was still one more international race to get to and so, after doing the timing and results for Ballbuster and the Merrell MudMan, Jen and I slipped out of the country to head for somewhere much, much warmer: Busselton, Western Australia. Jen won an entry to the race when we were down in Sherborne last year and they kindly let us slip it to 2008 so it was something that had long been planned for. As an added bonus we were also going to meet up with old friends, both for the race and then for some R&R in Sydney afterwards. If you're going all that way you might as well make the most of it!

With Australia hosting both the World Short and Long Course Championships next year it was also a great opportunity to test out the transportation. We flew Quantas to Perth via Singapore and, apart from being robbed blind by the airline for a perfectly in-limits bike box on the way out, the journey was OK. Perth is a great city; small enough to have a friendly feel yet big enough to have all the facilities and attractions. Sadly with just two days to spend there we barely scratched the surface but it's definitely a place we want to go back to. A couple of words of warning, though. Australian Customs are serious people. Make sure you declare everything like energy foods and any special dietary stuff you are bringing in. They will even want to see your bike tyres to make sure they aren't carrying dirt. Very helpful, very friendly but 100% serious.

Every Ironman venue has something special about it and Ironman WA has Busselton's incredible 1.8k jetty stretching out into the Indian Ocean. No dark, cold start here, this was full-on summer sunshine from 5:30am and as the day progressed I have to confess that the shade and air conditioning of the media centre (thanks, Kate!) made my day a whole lot more bearable than Jen's. By the time she had finished the bike it was clear that the sun had done its worst despite factor 30 suncream and any hope of a Hawaii slot was long gone. When you can see the shape of your Profile front bottle burned into your forearms you pretty much know the day isn't going to end well... After one loop of the run it was time to re-assess and in the company of Remmy from Taiwan, who is normally a 2:30 marathon runner, she settled in for a long evening walk. The finale was getting to cross the finish line with Mitch Anderson, who was helping out the IMG crew - the tattoo for this one may well feature the wheels well and truly off.

So, another year done and a whole load of new experiences under my belt. Two new continents visited and a whole new hemisphere as well - not sure why I waited so long to do either. And, alongside the places, a bunch of great people too from athletes to organisers and beyond. It's not like I have to tell any of you that but, when you are on the other side of the fencing, it's very refreshing to find that the barriers are not really there at all. What will 2009 bring? Lanzarote again, that much is certain, and I'm sure that the Human Race team will have plenty to be getting on with as well. As for Ironman Live - I can only hope that it brings me more of the same.