Wise advice on eve of Modern Pentathlon challenge

Sportsbeat's Josh Burrows and Matt Sherry are competing against each other in every Olympic sport between now and London 2012 - and this week it's modern pentathlon

SHARP SHOOTER: Olympic medallist Kate Allenby, pictured competing at her second Olympics in Athens, advice will be critical but will our dynamic duo spectacularly miss the target? (Getty Images)

By Josh Burrows, Sportsbeat

THERE'S an awkward pause as Olympic bronze medallist, Kate Allenby, asks hopefully if Matt or I have experience in any of the five disciplines that make up the modern pentathlon. The silence is because it takes me a minute or so to actually remember what the five disciplines are.

Kate sounds mildly impressed when she learns that I've got some experience in shooting. But somehow it's the 200m swim, 3km cross-country run and show-jumping I'm more worried about.

"I rode a camel on holiday once," I suggest timidly.

"Well, er, that's good then," Kate replies, politely disguising how little my vacation activities impress her. Apparently though it's not the individual sports that will cause the most problems - it's doing them one after the other.

"The most difficult thing will be going from sport to sport and getting into the mentality of each of them," Kate explains. "In pentathlon, everybody has an Achilles heel and there is a sport among the five that your mental and physical make up is just not suited to. "

"Probably all five of them" is what I'm thinking, but instead I mumble something about how Matt and I are both in fitness training. It's a lie. We're not.

"There's nowhere to hide either," Kate adds. "But you play to your strengths and weaknesses."

For Britain's women in the past ten years there has been more strength than weakness on show.

Since the first women's modern pentathlon competition at the Sydney Games in 2000 - where Kate won bronze - Britain has never been out of the medals.

Georgina Harland came third in Athens in 2004 and last year Heather Fell went one better in Beijing to take silver.

In November 2008, The International Union of Modern Pentathlon changed the sport slightly in an effort to make it more popular.

Shooting and running have been combined into a sort of biathlon meaning the sport is technically no longer a pentathlon. It is a change that Kate has been vocally opposed to but it is unlikely to make much of a difference to Matt and me.

Asked if there's any hope of us escaping from our pentathlon training with our dignity intact, Kate tells me that we shouldn't worry about embarrassing ourselves. She is a woman who hasn't had the pleasure of watching Matt attempt to walk up a hill.

The former Olympian says she's confident that a decent mental attitude will get us through a tough session at the Bath5 Modern Pentathlon Club that she coaches at.

And encouragingly Kate also admits she was never a massive fan of fitness work herself.

"I never really enjoyed gym and weight training that much and I wasn't very good at the dieting bit either," she added.

"I was quite good at coming back from training and emptying the fridge. For me, it wasn't eating chips or drinking in pubs, just the ability to devour the contents of the cupboard very quickly."

So perhaps there is hope for us yet. Soon we'll find out. I'd be lying if I said I couldn't wait.

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