The Frogman of Ironmonger Row

This morning saw me at the swimming pool at the crack of dawn again - or at least I think it was the crack of dawn as it was so foggy that I wasn't entirely sure whether dawn had broken.  The pool was quite busy this morning and I hadn't gone very far when I spied my freediving frogman friend at the bottom of the pool again.  This time, he was moving so, although he made me jump (not literally, it's quite difficult to jump when your feet are surrounded only by water), I wasn't concerned for his safety.  However, he managed to make me jump another six times during my swim by suddenly appearing far beneath me.

Many ticks

This morning's session was similar to Tuesday's in that there was a four length warm up (which I did as four actual lengths of the 30.5m pool without any scaling), a 16 length main session (which I'll talk about shortly) and a two length cool down (also done as two actual lengths without scaling.  The main session involved scaling issues because it was supposed to be 16 x 25m done as 4 x two lengths (i.e. not stopping after one length but having a short break after two) and 8 x one length (with a short break after each length).  As discussed in my previous swimming post, in order to not break myself by overtraining at this early stage, and given that I'm working to a sprint distance training plan rather than a super sprint one and swimming the actual number of lengths prescribed in a 30.5m pool instead of a 25m pool would result in many extra metres of swimming, I'm having to scale the number of lengths so as to get as near to the distance and tasks included in the plan as I can within the confines of an oddly calibrated body of water.  Therefore, having realised that today's session was all about joining up the lengths I'd already mastered on Tuesday, I scaled the session to be 4 x 60m and then 6 x 30m.  This made my total swim distance today (with the warm-up and cool-down) 600m, meaning I've swum 1.2km in total so far.

Now onto the exciting part.  As the pool was so busy, especially the slow lane, I found myself struggling, even in my warm-up, just to do a length of breaststroke without bashing into people and having to overtake very swiftly to avoid crashing into people coming the other way while I did so.  Even though I struggled to maintain form after a few lengths on Tuesday, I knew that my crawl was significantly faster than my breaststroke and I wouldn't be able to do my session properly in the traffic I was dealing with.  Therefore, I had two choices - abandon the session and just pootle up and down doing breaststroke, or move to the medium lane!  I took a look around and saw that the nearer of the medium lanes had only three people in it and figured I could give it a go and see what happened.  I could always retreat to the safety of the slow lane if I embarrassed myself with my over-inflated ideas of how fast I was.  So, off I went to the medium lane, for the first time ever, and started swimming my first two lengths of crawl.  It was all fine.  In fact, on the third set of two lengths, I realised that I had just overtaken a man swimming in the fast lane, although I thought that moving up to the medium lane was plenty for one day.  I did the whole of my main set of lengths in the medium lane, before moving back to the slow lane for my cool-down.

Possibly the world's most silly
swimming injury

The other exciting (that's not the right word really) thing that happened in the pool was that I got my fist injury of this training campaign.  It must be pretty difficult to injure oneself swimming, but I did just that.  The medium lane is half the width of the slow lane - or, rather, the medium lane is only one lane width, whereas the slow lane is two, plus the extra little bit to account for a gap between the last lane and the side of the pool.  Therefore, it can be a bit of a tight squeeze going up and down the pool in the medium lane, especially if one person is doing breaststroke (thereby making them wider as they kick their legs out).  As a result of this, I was very much aware of keeping to my side of the lane, so as to avoid upsetting anyone, but this proved to be my downfall - as I was putting my arm into the water on a stroke, I clipped the lane rope with my forearm.  It stung a tiny bit when I did it, but then I noticed once I'd got to work that I had quite a mark where I'd hit my arm.  Now there is a mark, but no pain, which has to be a good outcome in the circumstances.

Tomorrow is a running day.  It's also a netball match day.  I haven't quite figured out how these two things are going to interrelate yet.

I want to ride my (tri-)cycle

Today was a cycling day.  I got up bright and reasonably early in order to ride into work and, eventually, back again, went about my morning routine, almost got to the point of finding and putting on my cycling gear when I looked out of the window.

Fog.

Many fog.

Now, I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to doing things in adverse weather conditions, especially in the name of charidee and/or fitness - many a time I've gone out running in the pouring rain or voluntarily covered myself in mud while doing burpees (yes, I know I can see someone about this affliction, thanks) - but there are two particular elements that I, as a still novice cyclist, fear above all: one is icy, snowy weather (for obvious reasons); the other is fog.  No matter how much hi-viz clothing I put on, no matter how much I look like a brightly-lit Christmas tree, I still don't think it is necessary for me to cycle from A to B in the fog when there is an alternative that doesn't involve traffic.

Tick, tick, tick, tick

The problem I then had was that there wasn't enough time for me to get in my prescribed half an hour on the turbo trainer in our conservatory before I had to leave to get the train to work.  I decided that I would either go out for a ride on the road or get on the turbo trainer when I got home.  As it happened, by the time I got off the train, the fog had completely cleared and it was a beautiful sunny day.

Once home, I decided that the turbo trainer was the way forward (not literally, of course - that would result in me bursting through the conservatory windows into the pond) and I had been in the saddle for about three minutes before realising that I had made a very bad decision.  In my excitement to just get on with it (none of that procrastination, remember), I had completely forgotten that the turbo trainer bike has a men's racing saddle on it, otherwise known as a stick.  By the time I was halfway through, I was shifting my position every thirty seconds or so, just to maintain feeling in my backside and, by the end of the ride, my toes were tingling (I have since found out that the tingling toes are a "feature" of riding this bike, as James also has this problem).  Needless to say, I shall not be repeating this experience unless and until the saddle issues are resolved, either by the procurement of a different saddle or by getting a gel seat cover - bear in mind that I was already wearing padded cycling tights, so this saddle is really, really bad.

Anyway, I got to the end and I'm now really looking forward to getting up at non-existent o'clock in the morning to go swimming.  No, really, I am.

Tri waits for no man (or woman)

Today was unutterably rubbish.  I will expand upon this at some point in the future (thereby making it utterable, I suppose), but this is not the time - suffice it to say that I am fine and you are not to worry about me.  However, even though I've only been training for two days before today (and one of them was a rest day), I find myself with fresh purpose.

Even before taking into account the aforementioned rubbishness, fitting in my whole 20 minutes of running today was always going to be a bit of a struggle.  The main problem was that I had to be at work early this morning for a photo-shoot.  Bearing in mind that I am a lawyer and not a model/photographer/editor/journalist, this was quite some occurrence.  I found myself being pimped and preened by a make-up and hair lady who seemed mildly obsessed with my hair (in front of my boss, which was just weird) before pretending to have a meeting while a photographer who referred to himself as a piano player and his six-strong entourage took endless pictures that I'm not convinced I'll ever want to see.  The result of this was that my whole day was a little behind and I had a couple of trowels' worth of slap on my face that would need to come off before I did anything vaguely athletic, thereby making my original idea of running at lunchtime incredibly cumbersome (much time for make-up off and get changed, actual run time, shower and change time).

Day 3 and counting...

I formulated a new plan, which meant that I would go to netball training after work as usual and then as soon as I got home I would dump all my stuff and get out of the door.  I had to have another change of plan though - I set off from the office a little bit late for netball and then when I got to the tube, the trains were all too packed to get on.  At the point where I was already half an hour late for netball, I gave up and went home, then went straight back out again for my run.

I haven't been running for running's sake for a very long time, so I was expecting twenty minutes to be very hard.  I'm pleased to say it wasn't even nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.  I did need to have a short walk in the middle as the sides of my ankles were hurting (an issue I always have when running after a long break) but from a cardio-vascular perspective I was absolutely fine - I had been expecting to have more than one walking break, so this was a good result.  I did a small tour of my local area, only nearly got bitten by a dog and must have managed a negative split since I turned back exactly on 10 minutes and had to run past my house to get to 20 minutes.  I only managed 1.29 miles (2.07km), but it has shown me that the 2.5km I need to do in the triathlon should be a doddle in 11 weeks' time as long as I keep up the training.  I just keep having to remind myself that running is the discipline I'm least good at, that the session was marked "easy pace" and that it will get easier as I progress through the programme.

Tomorrow, I shall mostly be cycling.  The jury's out on whether that will be on the turbo trainer or a cycle into work and back...

The Tri-als and Tri-bulations of Tri-training

Facebook is a wonderful thing.  It meant that yesterday, when logging on, I was duly informed by WorldTri that here is my training plan for the triathlon and yes, I should just get on with it please thank you very much.  I opened up the document and discovered that I was already in the middle of doing all the training I was required to do yesterday - rest.  I'm quite good at that.

Unfortunately, we all have a tendency to favour training in the things we are already good at, so I shall have to curb my enthusiasm for further training in "resting" and direct my attention at the "doing" that all of the other days of this week require.

After last year's completely ridiculous Lenten vows (where I somehow found myself giving up pretty much everything to eat or drink, in my view exempting myself from any ingestion-related privations for the next five years), I decided to give up something a little more philosophical (and psychological) this year - procrastination.  I'm not even joking when I say that it took me four days after the start of Lent to decide that this would be my Lenten commitment, but it wasn't really through an inability to make a decision - rather, it was a lack of inspiration (that's my story and I'm sticking to it).  Therefore, when someone (WorldTri, no less) presents me with a training plan for an event I'm going to do, I must get on with it and stop thinking about whether I can put off beginning until tomorrow or next week or the week after.

Progress so far

It was against this background that I found myself in the pool this morning at some ungodly hour that doesn't even exist.  OK, it was 8 a.m.  I know you've all been up for hours by then, getting kids ready, getting yourself ready, getting to work early and so on, but that's just not how things work for me, so it was excruciatingly early.

There are a couple of issues with the training plan, the main one being that it is for the sprint distance triathlon, which is a lot further than the super sprint I'm attempting.  To be fair, neither involves huge distances, so I'm sure training on the basis of a sprint distance will not be the end of the world.  However, to add to this, the training plan assumes that I'm training in a 25m pool.  I am not.  I am training in a 30.5m pool.  I don't know who designed the pool, but if they were still around (unlikely given the age of the building) I would give them a stern talking to.  This means that I have a couple of options: (a) just treat "lengths" as "lengths" regardless of their length (if you get my drift) and (b) scale the distances so that I'm actually swimming as nearly as possible the total distance required in each section of a training session.  On the one hand, (a) is a bad deal since I'm already going to be doing more than is required for a super sprint distance if I follow this training plan and those extra 5.5m per length soon start to add up.  On the other hand, (b) just isn't very convenient - when the plan calls for having a short breather after, say, every two lengths (remember we're in the early stages here) and doing a total of 16 lengths in a particular section of the session, then it doesn't really work out; I can't just stop in the middle of a length and I can't take my breaks where I'm supposed to.  I'm sure that in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter as long as I'm approximately in line with the prescribed sessions, but it does make it all a bit complicated.

This morning, I decided that scaling the number of lengths so as to do the right distance was the way forward for the main part of the session.  The first section was a 4x25m any stroke warm-up, which I just did as four lengths (120m on the basis of a 30m length - life's too short to do the sums for the half metre).  The main focus was 16x25m front crawl with short breaks in between lengths.  This amounts to 400m and I decided after about three lengths that I was definitely scaling the lengths back to fit the distance, so I did 14 lengths, which is 420m - still slightly over the set distance.  Finally, there was a 2x25m any stroke cool-down, which I did as two lengths or 60m, bringing my total for the morning to 600m.

I discovered that while I can pootle up and down the pool doing breaststroke at a reasonable pace for seemingly hours on end, the same cannot be said of crawl.  Since childhood I've been a pretty strong swimmer, but since the annual humiliation of the House Swimming Competition at school (which involved me always doing the individual medley on the grounds that I was the only one in my house willing to vaguely approximate butterfly) finally stopped when I was 18, I haven't had much call for racing about at top speed in the water and my forays into front crawl tend to be limited to a couple of lengths per swim if I'm feeling spritely.  This means that while my technique is fundamentally pretty good, I'm really struggling to maintain form after a few lengths, particularly in respect of breathing.  I made it to the end of the session, although one could have been forgiven for thinking a (cooked) lobster was getting out of the pool rather than a person, and I suspect my "short breaks" between lengths were right on the cusp of the meaning of "short" by the end of the main section!

I have a few things to work on: (i) bi-lateral breathing (I only want to breath to the left at the moment), (ii) not holding my breath when my face is in the water and (iii) getting a swimming cap, as I think one of the problems I have is my hair flicking water into my face when I surface, which makes me panic a bit.

Speaking of panicking, I did quite a lot of that when I saw a freediver (complete with wetsuit and fins) lying motionless on the bottom of the pool, but it turned out he was just practising holding his breath.

Tomorrow is a running day, apparently.  Watch this space.

If you'd like to follow along with my training, the plan I'm working to is here (click on the link for the pdf to open).  Even more importantly, if you'd like to sponsor me for my triathlon endeavours, I'm doing this to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care (which is a charity very close to my heart at the moment) and you can make a donation by going to this page.

Tri-Angles

Happy New Year, everyone! (Yes I know it's February now, but it would be rude not to, wouldn't it?)

The year is not the only thing that's new around here.  I have some very, very exciting news that I found out only this morning - I'm going to be a TRIATHLETE!!  To be honest, the idea of even being an athlete is quite alarming, never mind being one three times, but on with it I must get.

I've been thinking about training for and entering a triathlon for a while now.  For quite a long period last year I was swimming regularly in the mornings and I'd forgotten just how much I like it; given that I've already done the "running thing" and now I've learnt to ride a bike, the swimming was the missing piece in the triathlon jigsaw.  However, since I did all that swimming, I've had a bit of an enforced shutdown due to breaking my finger in November.  Now I'm more or less back to full power, I no longer have any excuses.

So, last week I saw an advert for the ITU Worldtriathlon London 2014 and I entered the ballot, more or less on a whim, but with the background of having been thinking about a triathlon for a while, and this morning I found out that I have secured a place.  This means that on Sunday, 1 June I will not be playing the organ in church, but will rather be bombing it around Hyde Park in several different outfits.

There's one thing that you should understand about this triathlon.  I'm not going in all guns blazing for a full Ironman-distance event - the London Marathon nearly finished me off, without having to swim and cycle first.  The distance I'll be attempting is a baby triathlon.  They call it a "Super Sprint" distance, but I'm not sure I'll be doing much actual sprinting.  To be precise, I'll be swimming 400m (about a quarter of a mile) in the Serpentine, cycling 15.5km (about 10 miles - note that this is more than the usual super sprint cycling distance) and running 2.5km (about a mile and a half).

None of this sounds particularly taxing to me as I know that I can do each of these things in isolation already, but when you add in the event's 1.5 hour time limit (beware the sweeper bus of doom), open-water swimming (which I've never done before), swimming in a wetsuit, two "costume changes" (transitions) and having to do the three disciplines in decreasing order of preference (why, oh why can't I start with the run and end with the swim?), there will be plenty of challenges to keep me occupied along the way.

I can see the question niggling about in the front of your brain, just waiting to come into your mouth and pass out between your lips - why am I doing this? Am I completely mad?  Well, some of you will know that in the past year, my life has been touched by cancer (not me personally) in a few different ways.  I don't want to go into all the personal details on t'interwebs, but suffice it to say that seeing someone else battle cancer can make you feel helpless.  You can give them loads of love and support and ensure they get the right treatment, but you can't actually do anything.  I know that it is the same with lots of other illnesses too, so that is why I've decided to do this triathlon to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care.  Marie Curie spend their time, efforts and the money you raise on looking after people with cancer and with terminal illness (whether cancer or not), and this triathlon is my way of "doing something" by raising money for them.

In due course, I'll set up a fundraising page and wotnot, but for now, I have a training plan to write!!

The First Annual London to Haywards Heath Night Ride

While you were getting into your pyjamas last night, brushing your teeth and tucking in your teddy bear, James and I were hot footing it over to Clapham Common for the London to Brighton Night Ride.  I say hot-footing it, but I mean desperately calling a taxi as the trains were unexpectedly not running (I did check, before you say anything).

Things had not, therefore, started well.  We had also discovered earlier in the day that we'd been given different start times (I had 23:30 and James had 23:00) and that James didn't have a bus ticket.  We managed to sort all of these things out eventually and we lined up to set of at half past eleven with a load of pretty much identically dressed folks - black lycra bottoms and fluorescent yellow lycra tops were the order of the day (or, rather, night).  A lot of people had really gone to town on their lighting displays with many looking like they had mistaken it for a Christmas event.

The first several miles were through London suburbia, largely uneventful but punctuated by the "encouraging" shouts, chants and other vocal exuberances of the pub chucking out time crowd.  We went past one group of girls shouting "Tour de France, Tour de France" at the top of their voices, in the most un-French accents imaginable - we weren't sure if they were genuinely confused or trying to be funny, but it was definitely us laughing rather than them...

The route for the night ride is substantially different from that for the day ride.  The day ride has quite a lot of big hills, but they are spread out and mostly short, sharp shocks.  The night ride starts by giving you an enormously long, slow climb which somewhat takes the wind out of your sails and makes the next few miles arduous as you try to recover.  It seems never ending, but when you do reach the top, you are rewarded with the first rest stop.  We needed a cup of tea and a sit down by that point, so that's what we did.

After that rest stop, we had a bit of a down hill run, which was a blessed relief after the gruelling start.  About three or four miles further on, there was a sharp downhill under a railway bridge into a sharp right hand bend.  As I went under the railway bridge, holding my line on the road, a car decided to overtake me.  It had the stereo blaring and was going too fast for the road layout and the fact that there were so many other vehicles (bikes) on the road.  As it came past, it swang wide in preparation for the right turn and clipped my front wheel, not hard enough to do any damage to the Beeblemobile, but enough to slam my already ailing left shoulder (from my whiplash injury a few months ago) into the wall of the bridge - in some ways I'm thankful the bridge was there, though, as the result if it wasn't could have been far worse.  Because of the right turn, no-one got the car's licence plate and as I thought I was relatively unscathed and I had somewhere to be, I left it and carried on.

Just after that incident, the route surprised us with another hideous hill, a spike at the 20 mile mark.  We were still only a third of the way in and already most people, including myself, were walking up the hills.  When I eventually made it to the top, James was waiting for me.  We had a drink and a rest and then decided to set off again.  At this point, James realised that he had a flat tyre.  We had planned for such eventualities and had a spare inner tube.  We realised that the puncture had been caused by a shard of glass that had slashed the rubber and left a hole.  It took quite a while to change the tube, but James managed it and we limped the ten miles to the next rest stop - James found this hard going as although he'd done the best with the pumps we had with us, it transpired he'd only got the fixed tyre up to about a third of the recommended pressure.  The very helpful service man at the rest stop quickly rectified this and we were on our way again.

At this point the sky was starting to get a bit lighter and my shoulder was getting a lot sorer.  Just before the rest stop, I'd hit a pothole hard and it made me cry as the impact jarred the whole of my left side.  James suggested that it was perhaps inadvisable to continue, but I'm a stubborn being and we weren't even half way.  So, on we pressed, past the half way mark and up another bl**dy hill.  It was becoming apparent that I could no longer control my bike at low speed and the proximity of other cyclists and cars on the road was making things a bit hairy.  We came to a place called Balcombe which had a station and we were ready to call it quits.  However, the first train from Balcombe on a Sunday is at 7:30 a.m. and it was only six o'clock.  We took a look at our map and realised that our best option was to carry on another four miles and then take a left turn into Haywards Heath when everyone else was going right towards Devil's Dyke and, eventually, Brighton.  And so it was that at 6:58 a.m. we got on a train that would take us home (well, nearly home), and I was in bed by 9.

We made it to forty miles, two-thirds of the way.  The night time course is significantly harder than the day time course and I'm not sure if I want to give it another go next year - I may have to accept that I'm beaten on this one.  My shoulder is still very sore, but I have good painkillers and I'll be booking to see a specialist about it as soon as I can; I'm not sure they will be able to do anything other than tell me to rest it.  I'm glad we stopped when we did, although I'm sorely disappointed not to have made it the distance (and I don't have a medal).

James and I would like to thank everyone who sponsored us for this event and we're really sorry that we didn't complete it.  However, rest assured that the donations you made will be just as valuable to British Heart Foundation in continuing their excellent and much-needed work.

Ready for Round Two

We successfully completed the London to Brighton event, and eventful it was.  For some reason, the organisers had tried to fix something that wasn't broken and created all of the bottlenecks in the world on the route, meaning it took us three hours longer than it should have to get to Brighton, which was, shall we say, less than excellent.  All of that's quite a long time ago now and I stumbled off my bike and straight back into a seemingly never-ending work, eat, don't bother to sleep cos sleeping's for wimps cycle.

Things are a little better now and I'm looking forward to Round Two - yes, this weekend it is the London to Brighton Night Ride!  It's come around very, very quickly and I'm far more excited about it than I was about the daytime version.  I have discovered that I love riding my bike at night.  Not when it happens to be dark at rush hour time, you understand (although that isn't the case at the moment), but when I have to ride home at 1 am because that's when I'm going home from work at the end of the week and I don't want to leave my bike in the City over the weekend - that's when it's lovely.  The buses are less frequent, so are not in the way.  There are far fewer cars around.  There are far fewer pedestrians around (other than in Shoreditch, which is clearly where all of the pedestrians go after dark so that they can wander around in the middle of the road, drunk or otherwise incapacitated).  It is peaceful and you can hear individual vehicles coming from miles off so you know they are there in plenty of time.  Bliss.

So, if the Night Ride conforms to my idealistic view of riding at night, then it should be a beautiful experience.  We have already received our Night Ride souvenir t-shirts.  The logo thingy on the front is sparkly - we're wondering if it's glow in the dark.

We're hoping that because we're cycling to Brighton twice, because the Night Ride is longer than the daytime event (60 miles instead of 54) and because, well, WE'RE CYCLING TO BRIGHTON AT NIGHT, you lovely folks might be persuaded to dip your hand into your pocket one more time to make a donation to British Heart Foundation - you can find our sponsorship page here.

I'll report back after the event and let you know if it lives up to my expectations!