The Tropics of Hackney

Today should have been a cycling day, but it turned out to be a swimming day.  You see, James no longer works in the same area of town as me and so no longer has easy access to a swimming pool during the week.  This means that he hadn't yet managed to do any swimming training for the triathlon, so we decided that rather than cycling today (it was a bit rainy, anyway), we would go swimming.  Thist means I'll have to cycle an extra day in the week, but that will be fine.

We decided that we should go to a swimming pool which is closer to our house than Ironmonger Row, just for the sake of having an adventure, so we went Clissold Leisure Centre, which is very close to Clissold Park in Hackney.  We got off the bus a stop early so that we could walk through the park and quickly discovered that there were loads of facilities there that we would have a look at on the way back.

Gratuitous picture of ducks

Clissold Leisure Centre is enormous.  There are three swimming pools (a main pool, a training pool and a toddler pool), each, somewhat bizarrely, with its own changing rooms.  There's also a gym and a sports hall and a number of other facilities.  Having done some research before hand, we knew we wanted the 25m main pool, which is dedicated to lane swimming at all times, has eight lanes and is a constant 2m depth the whole way across.

There's a big sign outside the pool area changing rooms that asks you to remove your shoes before going in.  I reckon the hit rate on people who comply with the sign is probably about 40%, which makes for a very wet and muddy changing area.  So far, I wasn't very impressed.

Once I got to the poolside I realised just how busy it was.  I know it was Sunday afternoon, but there were far more people there than I was expecting.  I got in and started off on a 4 x 50m breaststroke warm-up in the slow lane and quickly figured out that the rest of my swim was going to be in the medium lane at least - I may even need to venture up to the fast lane here.  Once in the medium lane, I did 4 x 50m of front crawl, arms only, using a pullbuoy.  It was during this set that I realised that there was nothing wrong with my goggles and it really was the water that was cloudy - certainly not the crystalline waters we're used to at Ironmonger Row.  I moved on to 6 x 50m with very short breaks in between and then 4 x 50m with slightly longer breaks and then finished with 2 x 50m (25m breaststroke, 25m best stroke front crawl).

A hackneyed old
goat!

I had completely lost James pretty early on in the swim and now that I'd finished, I could see that he was plodding up and down the medium lane doing breaststroke (he must have moved up to medium just as I'd finished and gone to find him in the slow lane!) - I started to get a bit cold waiting for him, so I did another couple of lengths of breaststroke, taking my total for the day to 1.05km, meaning my swimming grand total now stands at 6.27km.

All in all, we weren't that impressed with Clissold Leisure Centre - all the infrastructure is there for it to be a really nice pool, but it didn't seem very clean and everywhere was a bit chaotic, including in the pool itself (on both counts).  The only upside is that, at 25m, it means I don't have to scale my training (although the lengths do feel very short!), but that isn't enough to make me want to go there again.  We're planning to rearrange my training schedule so that we go swimming every weekend, but we'll be trekking all the way to Ironmonger Row in the future.

On the way back through the park, we went for a bit of an explore.  Among the wondrous things in the park are some animal enclosures and we went for a wander around.  The first creature we came across was this tropical little chap, who seemed very interested in the nuts on James' ice lolly.

The victorious Cumberland G Team

Around the corner, we met some goats and a herd of deer - because why wouldn't there be a herd of deer in the middle of Hackney...?

Yesterday, I managed to completely ignore the fact that I was supposed to be running, but did play netball in my team's last match of the season - we won 19-14 (again) and, because of the way other results fell in yesterday's matches, we finished second in our division.

Tomorrow is a rest day and I'm definitely going to be resting.  If you would like to sponsor my rest day, you can make a donation to Marie Curie Cancer Care by clicking on the Justgiving link on the right hand side of the page!

A herd of deer.  In Hackney.  Of course.