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!