Only one more sleep to go!

Today was a registration day.  We got up this morning and went to Hyde Park to pick up all our bits and bobs ready for tomorrow.  The first thing I had to navigate was having entered the triathlon in my married name and having photo ID in my maiden name.  I decided to take our marriage certificate with me in case there were any issues, but it turned out that taking my husband was sufficient.

It was great to go and have a look at the course and the transition area today so that we have a vague idea of where we're going tomorrow. The elite races were on today, although when we were there it was the corporate relays that were going on.  That said, there were quite a few GB athletes wandering about (in kit) from all different age groups, warming up and getting ready for their races later in the day.

The "blue chicken"

We had a bit of walk around the expo and James got his last bits and pieces from one of the stalls, then we had to head home as I had a rehearsal this afternoon.  Now we're home and sorting everything out because I have to play the organ at church tomorrow morning, so we won't have too much time to get ready after that and before we need to set off.

I've written my name in my wetsuit, pumped up my tyres (not that they needed much) and found all my kit.  Now the main thing is to work out which stickers need to be affixed to which bits of me and my bike! James, on the other hand, has been spending quite a long time trying to figure out how to put on his race-day swimming hat.  So far we've had the "blue chicken" and the "utterly inept".  I'm looking forward to being able to share the "properly on the head" at some point in the future.

The "utterly inept"

Just about all there is left to do at this point is wait until we go to the park tomorrow - I'd actually rather do it all now than go through the waiting, but wait we must!  I keep going through everything in my head - how I'm going to wait for everyone else to get away on the swim, how I'm going to be super-speedy on my bike, how my transitions are going to pan out.  I'm not thinking about the run, though.  I try not to think about running.

This time tomorrow, we will have finished and will hopefully be enjoying a well-deserved picnic in the park.  If you'd like to sponsor my triumphal sausage roll, there's still time to do so by going to www.justgiving.com/bbjatriathlon and donating a few quid to Marie Curie Cancer Care.

One Week to Go!

This time next week, I'll be putting on my tri-capris, packing my wetsuit and making sure I have the requisite number of shoes - it will be race day!!

I can't believe how quickly it has come around.  This weekend, I should be making my final preparations, making sure my transitions are smooth and putting in that last little bit of training.  Instead, I'm stuck indoors with a hideous cold and I feel rather like someone's shut my head in a washing machine.  Some might say that this is actually very good training for the start of the swim, where the number of flailing arms and legs means that the churning water resembles something along the lines of an old-fashioned twin-tub.  However, my view is that I want to be out on my bike but I can't even think about walking for more than about ten minutes without feeling woozy.

The good news is, of course, that these things are usually quite short-lived and having it now rather than this time next week is definitely better.  I'm not sure that helps my mood much, but I think I am now over the worst of it and anticipate feeling a lot better tomorrow, and possibly ready for a bit of training.

If you haven't had a moment to sponsor me for the triathlon yet, it's definitely not too late.  I'm doing it to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care in memory of my Uncle Donald and you can help me by making a donation on my Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/bbjatriathlon.  Thank you for all your support!

A service with a smile

Today is a cycling day.  Well, sort of.  I'm still trying to pretend I'm not ill while suffering immensely with a horribly cough (and, now, you'll be pleased to hear, the occasional sneeze), but there was a more pressing health need than my own at stake today.

After getting up early to vote this morning, I got on my bike and cycled down to the gatehouse to the reservoir where I went swimming a couple of weeks ago and dropped it off with Jon at BikeMech for a service.  In 10 days' time (gulp!) my bike will need to go through a (probably quite rudimentary) safety check on the way into the triathlon transition area and, as it hasn't ever had any work done on it or been looked at from a technical perspective by anyone other than me, James and the nice guy who fixed my toe clip a couple of weeks ago, I figured it was probably about time that someone cast a professional eye over it.

Over all, it wasn't in bad shape, but my perennial gear problem has been playing up a bit lately and I also had an issue with the front mudguard (mostly that it was held on by one bolt when it should have four, and the wires that were supposed to hold it on were all bent the wrong way from it being folded).

I rolled up to the workshop just after it opened and was greeted by Jon's beautiful dog, who keeps him company while he works.  Having made a new friend, I knocked on the door and poked my head around to find a tardis-like set-up that the Doctor would be proud of - tools and parts as far as the eye could see (which wasn't very far, but you get my drift) and there were at least three bikes in there as well.

After Jon had taken my details, I left my "baby" with him and caught the bus to work.  It always seems a bit odd when one has cause to go on public transport with a cycle helmet and bag but without a bike.  I got some very funny looks.

This evening I left work a little early to go and pick the bike up.  The dog was snoozing this time, and Jon had the bike all ready.  I gave it a quick spin up to the filter station and back and the improvement was enormous - it just feels, well, better.  The gears are smooth, the brakes are good and, importantly, my front mudguard no longer flaps about in the wind.  The cost of all this fine tuning?  £25.  I was amazed at how little it was.  I shall be returning.

The Money Shot

I promised faithfully, some time ago, that upon reaching £100 of donations for Marie Curie Cancer Care I would post a photo of me in my oh-so-glamorous (and ever-so-slightly-stripey) swimming hat.

Well, dear reader, that day has finally come.  Today, our fundraising total hit £115, thanks to a generous donation from a work colleague, and so here it is - the Money Shot - my swimming hat pic.

I think it's particularly attractive as I seem to have managed to contort my eyebrow into a strange position by sticking it to my hairline with the hat; trust me, I can't do that unaided by silicon!

Just because we've reached this mini-milestone along the way doesn't mean it's too late for you to donate if you haven't yet had the chance - you never know what picture you might get if we hit £200....!  The button to get to our Justgiving page is on the right hand side - click it and follow the instructions.  Thanks once again for all your support!

Where have I gone?

The Sidley Singers at the Legal
Harmony choral competition

Yeah, I know, I went missing again.  This time, life got in the way and that meant that last week was a rest week.  The combination of singing in a choral competition at Southwark Cathedral, having to finish making a quilt for a retiring vicar and my husband's birthday meant that I didn't have any time at all to do any training - all those early mornings that I would have been swimming or cycling were spent in my loft stitching and all my evenings were taken up with netball, more quilting, the choral competition itself and a birthday party.


My plan was, therefore, to get back on the bike and back in the pool (and, I suppose, back into my running shoes) this week to prepare myself for the triathlon, which is now less than two weeks away.  However, now I have another problem - I'm ill.  I have a cough-type thing which is really annoying and is probably only going to get worse if I start exerting myself too much.  I've figured that I'd rather do the triathlon and be slightly under-prepared than try training too much while ill and not make it to race day.  I will be doing a bit, but given that I should be into my taper now anyway, I won't be overdoing it.

The Quilt

It seems, therefore, that now is a good time to be reminding both myself and you why it is that I'm putting myself through all this.  As I have mentioned before, the reason I initially entered the triathlon was that I wanted to do something to support my Uncle Donald, who was suffering from oesophogeal cancer.  He was still at home at that point and my parents were caring for him, but he was deteriorating and had to go into hospital soon after.  Because I live and work so far away from the family home, and also because of the very nature of his illness, I felt like I wasn't able to actually do anything to make it better.  Therefore, I hit on the idea of raising some money for Marie Curie Cancer Care, a charity that our family may ultimately have needed to use the services of in one way or another.  As it happened, Uncle Donald's condition deteriorated very quickly and he died in hospital on 12 March, before we had been in contact with Marie Curie.

Marie Curie provide home nurses and hospice care to patients who are at the end of their lives.  They enable people to be cared for in the place that they wish, whether that be in their own home or in a specialist environment.  In addition, they provide invaluable support to families and carers, giving advice and encouragement and just generally being there to call on when needed.  It must take an extremely special kind of person to be an end of life care nurse - this is something I had first hand experience of witnessing in the hospital where my uncle spent his last weeks; although they were not Marie Curie nurses, their job is similar, and I could not believe the amount of understanding, compassion, care, cheerfulness and love they showed to their patients.  These people deserve our support for the amazing job that they do, and one of the ways that we can support them is by donating money.

This is why I decided to do the triathlon - I would be extremely grateful if you could show your support for my efforts by making a donation to Marie Curie Cancer Care.  You can do that by going to this page, clicking the "donate" button and following the instructions.  Thank you all for being with me on this journey.

Swim-distancegate and the cut-off time saga

Today is a rest day.  It isn't supposed to be a rest day, but I'm out tonight, straight from work, for my netball team end of season dinner, so kit management was going to be too difficult for me to train as well.  I'll do something tomorrow - I'm not sure what, but something.

However, in the last couple of days, there has still been stuff going on.  The main thing has been the publication of the start times and race numbers for all the competitors in the WorldTri London triathlon, along with the Competitor Guide (which has in it all of the info about where to be and when). So, at 17:00 on Sunday, 1 June, I shall be starting my first triathlon in Wave 61, wearing a blue swimming hat and sporting number 5395. James will be starting at the same time, with similar headgear, and number 5394.  Needless to say, if you're around in London that day and would like to cheer us on, make your way to Hyde Park as it would be great to see a few friendly faces!!

Some of the things that the Competitor Guide does are to set out exactly how many laps you have to do in each discipline and, crucially, how far each of the three triathlon distances is and what the cut-off times are (i.e. the time you have to complete the triathlon within, else they might pull you off the course and not let you finish).  When we signed up for the super sprint distance, the website said (and still does say), quite clearly, that the swim distance is 400m.  This is what we've been training for and, as I've found out in the last couple of days, what all the other super sprinters have been training for, too.  However, in the Competitor Guide, consistently throughout, the swim is referred to as being one lap of 500m.  That would represent an increase in the swim distance of 25%.  That's a lot further.

In addition, we had been told at sign-up that the cut-off time for the super sprint distance would be 1.5 hours.  While this is certainly achievable for me, it could have got a little on the tight side in the event that I got my leg stuck in my wetsuit or, for example, had to swim 500m instead of 400m.  In the Competitor Guide, however, the cut-off is set at an absolute time of 7 p.m., regardless of what your start time is - for me, with a 5 p.m. start time, this means that I would have an extra half an hour to complete the race, which would take off a huge amount of pressure (during my marathon training I learned to live in abject terror of the sweeper bus); for those with a later start, though, this would mean they might have five or ten minutes less time to finish.

There were a number of other errors in the Guide as well (such as a reference to the event being on 1 May and the number of laps for the sprint distance being put in for the super sprint), but the swim distance and cut-off times seemed to be the main issue.

The super sprinters, including me, very quickly took to social media - first of all to verify among ourselves that our understanding of 400m swim and 1.5 hour cut-off was consistent (which it was), and then to try to get some answers on how far we needed to be swimming and, effectively, how fast.  There were many, many tweets and facebook messages to the organisers asking for clarification and several people said they had e-mailed as well (which I also did).  Eventually, last night, someone got a response to an e-mail and posted it on facebook - the swim is 400m and the cut-off is about 7 p.m. but they aren't going to enforce it too rigidly.  Result.  The cut-off time saga is over.  Swim-distancegate is resolved.  As you were.

Water Music

Today is a swimming day.  My journey to the pool was, thankfully, less traumatic than for my equivalent swim last week - the tube strike has been called off, so I was able to get the train with no trouble at all.  However, I woke up this morning with an earworm - for the uninitiated, a tune in my head that won't go away.  Unfortunately, I can't tell you what my earworm was (in fact, still is!) because it is part of a top secret programme!  We have a choir where I work and we have entered the Legal Harmony Choral Competition, which is taking place at Southwark Cathedral next week.  We'll be competing against six other law firms and barristers' chambers and will be performing three pieces in the competition.  I'll let you know how we get on!

When I got to the pool, the earworm was still ringing around my brain and, as I was swimming up and down the pool, I realised that I was swimming in time with the music in my head and that this meant I was swimming very, very fast (for me, that is - I hadn't suddenly morphed into the Thorpedo).  As this was such fun, I tried it with one of the other pieces we're rehearsing and found that it was too slow and I wasn't really going anywhere, so I tried the third - an utter disaster!  This piece has a very syncopated rhythm, which meant that I was all over the place; I couldn't work out which arm I should be moving when and I must have looked pretty strange to anyone watching.  I decided that it would probably be best if I went back to the original tune and ended up finishing my swim much earlier than I had anticipated.

The other thing about today's swim was how warm the water was - it was the same temperature as normal, but compared to the Baltic conditions at the reservoir on Sunday, it was positively balmy!  Beginning to swim in the pool felt like swimming on a feather bed of water - soft and warm and cosy.  I'd better not get too used to it!

The session today was a relatively easy one: 2 x 120m breaststroke warm-up, followed by a main session of 240m front crawl, 180m front crawl arms only and 180m front crawl and then a cool-down of 60m breaststroke and 60m best stroke front crawl.  This added up to a total of only 1.08km, taking my swimming grand total to 14.48km.

On the way to the pool this morning, the sun was shining and it was warm enough not to bother with a coat.  I hadn't looked at the weather forecast and assumed it would be the same all day.  When I left the swimming pool, though, it was absolutely tipping it down, which, although my hair was already wet, was less than excellent.  It's sunny again now, though.  The rain made the market at Whitecross Street seem even more alive and colourful this morning - I love that walk to work, even in the rain!

Whitecross Street Market in the
early morning rain

Doing the Lambeth Walk

Today is a cycling day.  It is also the day chosen by my friend Farah to host our little group of flamenco buddies at her house for lunch.  Farah lives in Clapham.  You can see where this is going.

Clapham is pretty much diametrically opposite Harringay on a map of London, over ten miles away.  I knew roughly where Farah's house was, but I had no idea of how to get there by road, so I asked Google Maps for cycling directions.  I should have thought twice about relying on them when the first part of the journey, while probably the shortest route, was a really silly way to go.  I set out from home probably half an hour later than I had intended and cycled my usual route down to Newington Green and then went the same way I had to get to the London Metropolitan Archives a few weeks ago, to Rosebery Avenue.  After that, I turned onto Farringdon Road which, it being a bank holiday, was utterly deserted, and then went under Holborn Viaduct and up to Ludgate Circus.

The next part of my journey entailed me doing something I'd never done before - riding over the River Thames.  Although it has been quite a warm day, there has been a strong breeze, so I was slightly concerned about how windy it might be on Blackfriars Bridge.  However, the rail bridge (which now has Blackfriars Station actually on it) shelters the road bridge somewhat, so it was fine from that perspective, but it also shields the downstream view from the road bridge user, which is a shame!

Once over the river, it was a straight ride down to St. George's Circus, which is a roundabout at which I knew I needed to turn right onto Lambeth Road.  What the directions hadn't told me, however, was that one can only get onto Lambeth Road at St. George's Circus if one approaches from the south.  Having figured out that to get onto the northbound carriageway I would have to do an illegal U-turn or stop on a red route, I opted for turning left down a side street, dismounting and walking across the road.  In all this excitement, I entirely missed Lambeth Road and ended up on Waterloo Road instead - completely the wrong direction.  This meant that I had to go back to St. George's Circus and repeat the whole performance of side street and walking before I eventually got myself onto the right road, to be rewarded with the pleasure of seeing the Imperial War Museum - a building which, in spite of nearly 12 years living in the capital and many visits as a child, I had never seen in the flesh before.  The museum is housed in one of the former homes of the Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam as it's perhaps better known, and I think the juxtaposition of a lunatic asylum against a museum of the history war is an interesting one.

The rest of the directions proved to be correct, although I would have preferred to go down the busy main roads than cycle along the pedestrian-riddled Riverside Walk.  I carried on past Battersea Dogs and Cats Home (our Ozzy's alma mater) and turned left onto Queenstown Road.  It was at this point that I came to the conclusion that the whole of South London is uphill.  From this point, it was just a few streets to my destination, and I arrived a little warm and only about an hour after I had intended.

I hadn't decided when I set out whether I would cycle back or get the train (it's fine to take bikes on the London Overground), but mention of the Tube strike that started this evening and is scheduled to carry on until Thursday made up my mind - if I cycled back, I would probably be too broken by the end of it to consider doubling up swimming and cycling tomorrow, or even on Wednesday, but that would be necessary if I'm to do any swimming before Friday; I don't want a repeat of last week's fiasco where I couldn't get on the train and had to go swimming in the evening, as I'm just not going to have time for that this week.

So, having spent a lovely afternoon with my pals from ten years of flamenco dancing, I walked with Ayesha to Clapham Junction to get the Overground to Willesden Junction, then changed for a train to Gospel Oak and then changed again to get to Harringay Green Lanes - with all the waiting for trains and the walk at both ends, it would have been quicker to cycle, even with getting lost.  On the other hand, I was pretty much falling asleep standing up on the train on the way back, so I think I made the right decision!  That meant that today's cycle was 17.90km, taking my total to 155.36km.

While I was waiting for the train at Willesden Junction, there was a chap on the platform who also had a bike with him.  He was an older Irish gentleman who I believe had been at the happy juice.  I was standing in front of my bike, against a wall and the chap came up to me and in a moment of remarkable lucidity asked me if it was a folding bike and how it worked.  Always happy to shock passers by with a demonstration of folding my full-size bike in half, I obliged and he thanked me and went to have a conversation with the departures board.

Before I go, my friend Claire alerted me to this fantastic reminder for all you other lady cyclists out there.  It's a list from 1895 of the things that lady cyclists shouldn't do.  I have managed to fall foul of a significant number of these just this weekend - I went to church in my bicycling costume (considering the alternative was going in my wetsuit, I think this was a good result), I have boasted of my long rides, and I wore laced boots, to mention but a few.  Enjoy!

Swim, Bike...Pray!

Ah, I love the smell of neoprene in the morning!  The title of this post is apt in two ways.  The first is that it sums up, very succinctly, my attitude to the running part of the triathlon.  The second is that it sums up my morning today.

I was up at the crack of dawn today (OK, it was already light, but 7 a.m. is the crack of dawn on a Sunday) to go to an open water swimming coached session at West Reservoir in Hackney.  The session started at 8.30 a.m. and is sufficiently close to our house that the quickest way to get there and back at that time on a Sunday morning was to cycle.   The session was an hour long, so we were a bit tight on time to get to the other thing I do on Sunday mornings - play the organ at my local church.  And so it was that I packed my newly-acquired wetsuit into my panniers, hopped on my bike and cycled to the reservoir.

You may have gathered from my liberal use of the word "we" that I was not alone.  James had also signed up for the session and I had assumed as I was cycling along that he would be right behind me. Apparently not - James had been running yesterday, like a good boy, and the resultant sore legs meant that he was struggling to keep up with me.  This was the first time we had cycled anywhere together since last summer and I realise now that it felt very different because I am no longer reliant on him to protect me on the big, bad road.  We look out for each other, of course, but I don't feel like a pupil any more and now feel like I can just do it all by myself.

The buoy in the foreground is the first, then the one on
the right, then the one on the left...

We got to the reservoir very early, which was just as well, as I had to get the wetsuit on.  We had never been to West Reservoir before, although I pass it on my way to work every time I cycle.  At the entrance to the lane that leads to it is a castle-shaped Victorian water pumping-station which now houses The Castle Climbing Centre.  Once along the lane, there is an old filter house which now houses a café, changing rooms and conference facilities, along with storage for various water sports paraphernalia.  The reservoir, along with its companion (and equally imaginatively named) East Reservoir, was installed in the 19th century to deal with the water that flows into the capital from the New River.  West Reservoir is no longer used by the water companies, so you can rest assured that I haven't been swimming in your cup of tea, but it is host to a wide range of activities, including kayaking and canoeing, sailing and, of course, open water swimming.

...then the last buoy and the base jetty on the far left.

We had no idea what to expect from the session, but once we were into our wetsuits, we went out onto the decked shore of the reservoir and started to meet up with a few other people who would be in our session (including our friend, Claire, who had alerted us to the existence of the session in the first place).  It turned out we were toward the lower end of the age spectrum and James was in a minority from a gender perspective.  It seemed like quite a lot of people had never been open water swimming before and quite a few were a bit nervous about the whole thing.  We met our antipodean instructor, Rowan, and listened to a brief safety briefing ("do what the lifeguards in the kayaks tell you, get out if you don't feel right") - then it was time for the main event: actually getting in the water.

It was at this point that I had a momentary existential crisis.  I've never particularly liked swimming in open water.  An incident involving a jellyfish in Tunisia when I was ten put me off swimming in the sea and, other than a bit of snorkelling in Thailand and the odd crossing of the River Lune in Kirkby Lonsdale as a student, I've managed to avoid swimming in open water for most of my adult life.  In my triathlon dream world, it was all going to be plain sailing and swimming in a lake would be just like swimming in a pool, so the harsh reality of being about to lower myself gently into a freezing cold reservoir that early in the morning was a bit of a rude awakening and I had a minor panic.  Somehow, I just kept going into the water, though.  My mind had decided that this was what I was doing now and that was that, completely overriding my emotional reaction.  Going into the water was a really strange experience.  It was very, very cold, and I felt it on my feet as I walked in from the edge down the ramp, but then as I kept going I was very conscious of my cold feet until I realised that I was nearly chest-deep in water and no other bits of me were cold - obviously, this was down to the wetsuit.

Once we were all fully in (there was quite a bit of "ah, ah, ah, it's cold, ah, ah" going on), Rowan, who was on the side, wearing a lifejacket (I never did decide whether this was reassuring or terrifying), got us to do some breathing exercises to get us used to putting our faces in the water.  To be perfectly honest, I felt a bit like my face was so cold it would crack in two, but after a few goes, I was used to it.  In a wetsuit, you can more or less float upright because it improves your buoyancy so much, but I was having difficulty transitioning between not upright and upright because my legs were so buoyant that I couldn't push them down under the water! We did a bit of a swim across the dock area, and the group naturally split into two - fast and not quite so fast.  Rowan sent off the faster group to do a lap of the buoys set out in the swimming area while the rest of us did a few more drills.  Then it was our turn to set out on a lap.  Rowan told us that we didn't have to go the whole way around all the buoys, we could head back in when we wanted, and we should feel free to have a rest when we needed to.  Someone asked how far it was around all four and the answer was 400m.  So, that was it, I had to get all the way around, in order to prove to myself that I could swim the distance for my triathlon in open water.

Some boat thingies

It's worth mentioning at this point that there were people swimming in the reservoir who weren't part of our session - they were just going for a morning swim.  I set off on my lap and immediately went slightly off course.  Once I realised, I adjusted and then started to make sure that I was keeping in the right direction every now and then by putting in a couple of strokes of breaststroke.  As I rounded the first of the four buoys, another swimmer, not part of our group, overtook me and then went off on a completely different trajectory from the one required to get to the next buoy.  Hot on his heels was one of the lifeguard kayakers, who had to cross my path to get to the other swimmer.  The kayak was quite a way ahead of me, but it did make me a little bit nervous for a moment.  On I kept with my mostly crawl with a peppering of breaststroke, around the other buoys, until I got overtaken by a much faster swimmer.  Then it hit me - I'd been lapped.  I could tell by the swimming hat that it was the same guy who'd struck out on his own before!

I finished my lap alongside a couple of other people in the group, but we were the last ones back.  I wasn't worried by that at all as it was my first time out, it was clear that some of the other swimmers in the group were very strong and, above all, I now know I can do it - I can swim 400m in open water without stopping!  I don't know how far we swam other than the 400m lap, so I'll just count that, and my swimming total is now 13.40km.

We still had a bit of time left in the session and some people set off for another lap, but quite a few of us decided to call it a day at that point.  In the changing room, there was quite a bit of chatter about why people were there.  A couple just wanted to give open water swimming a go, but most were triathletes or triathletes-to-be and one lady is even doing the same race as me.  The slightly early finish meant we even had time for a cup of tea before setting off for church.  The cycle back was a bit more strenuous than on the way - partly because of the tiredness from swimming, but mainly because it's uphill nearly all the way back!

The sessions run every week at the reservoir, and I'm sure we'll be back for more at some point.  They are run by Capital Tri, in case you're interested!

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

Today is a swimming day.  I have to admit that getting out of bed this morning was extremely difficult.  I had a very long and difficult negotiation meeting yesterday as part of my job, which took far more out of me than I had anticipated (the fact that it lasted twice as long as scheduled didn't help).  In any case, I did haul myself upright, into clothes and onto the train which, thankfully, was on time and not full to the rafters (do trains have rafters?) this morning.  However, something went wrong on the way as I ended up getting to the pool ten minutes later than normal (the train may have been slow, or I may have been slow) and spent the entire swim panicking about whether I was going to complete my session in time to get to work.

I started off in the slow lane this morning.  The pool wasn't very busy, but there were enough people in the medium lanes that adding me would have made them a bit crowded.  I did my 4 x 60m warm up and then did 4 x 30m of those horrible side crawl kicks.  This time, I was prepared and didn't back into the wall or scrape anything on the lane ropes.  The main part of the session was supposed to be 500m front crawl without stopping, but because of the 30m pool and the resultant odd number (17) of lengths to get over the 500m mark, I actually swam 540m of front crawl without stopping.  Then it was onto 5 x 60m front crawl with 15 second breaks (for which I moved up to the medium lane), followed finally by 60m of breaststroke and 60m of best stroke front crawl as a cool down.

I felt like I could have swum forever today.  Then I looked at the clock and realised I nearly had been swimming for ever and I'd better get a shift on.  My total distance this morning was another massive 1.32km, which takes my overall distance for swimming a gigantic (and very precise) 13.00km.

My fundraising, however, isn't quite going as well at the moment as my training!  The triathlon is less than a month away now, so it would be really great if you could give me some motivation to keep going by clicking the Justgiving link on the right hand side of the page and sponsoring me for the triathlon by making a donation to Marie Curie Cancer Care - we're not far off the threshold for that swimming hat picture now; could you be the one who makes sure it happens?

On Wednesday, after all the trials and tribulations of my cycle into work, I had an amazing ride home.  As usual, I forgot to start my watch until a little way into the ride, but it wasn't all that far in.  My ride home usually takes me between 35 and 40 minutes, depending on the traffic and whether I get stuck at traffic lights and so on.  On Wednesday, it took me 28 minutes.  I put this down to the new shoes giving me more power transfer and making me more efficient as for there to be that much of a difference all of a sudden, it can't just be down to my improved fitness.  The ride home was 7.42km, taking my total distance on the bike to 137.46km.

Tomorrow is a rest day, as I have exciting training plans for Sunday and Monday, so check back then to see what I've been up to!