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!

Angels and Demons

Today is a cycling day.  Let me start with last night, though.  After I got home from swimming, the first order of the evening was to do a bit of work on my bike (actually, that's a complete lie - the first order of the evening was to Pronto Pizza...).  Some time ago, I had bought some toe clips for my pedals, but I hadn't quite got around to (or got up the nerve to) put them on.  With only a month to go from tomorrow until the triathlon, I decided it was now or never and put them on.  First, I had to find my multi-tool with the right allen key on it to do up the bolts.  I had left it on the table by the turbo trainer in order to be able to retrieve my saddle and seat post and put them back on my bike, but it had somehow disappeared.  During the period that it must have disappeared in, James was the only one to use the turbo trainer.  That is all I have to say on the matter.

My beautiful new cycling shoes!

It was no problem, though - I just nicked James's multi-tool from his saddle pack, got my saddle back on my bike and then set about putting the toe clips on.  An easy enough job, just two bolts per clip through the holes that are already in the front of the pedal.  Yesterday, following a whole day of James waxing lyrical about his new cycling shoes, I succumbed and went to Cycle Surgery (again) to have a look at some for myself.  I bought the cheapest pair in the shop, which the sales guy and I agreed were the right ones for what I wanted them for.  I was a little bit hesitant about trying out both new toe clips and new shoes on the same trip, but then figured that as far as I am concerned they are effectively one piece of equipment and it would be better to do it all in one go than to have to get used to the toe clips and then use them with different shoes, or vice versa.

I decided that trying out this new arrangement for the first time on a busy road would be a very stupid thing to do, so planned to walk my bike to Finsbury Park, spend the time I needed getting used to the new stuff and then, assuming I was coping alright, cycle to work (I didn't really have a plan B, but I'm guessing I would have gone home and changed and got the train).  When I got to the end of my road, I was exceedingly glad that I had decided to walk to the park as there was nose to tail traffic on Wightman Road from beyond my road right up to the junction with Endymion Road (probably about a 1km queue, all told), presumably because of the tube strike - on foot, I probably beat some of the cars.  Once in the park, I hopped on and gave it a shot.  I had completely mixed feelings about the results - on the one hand, I couldn't get my left foot into the clip at all (I always start with my right foot on the pedal), but on the other hand, it was a revelation how little effort was required to go quite fast.

The good thing about toe clips is that if you can't get your foot in, it doesn't really matter, so long as the clip doesn't touch the floor when your foot is on the other side of the pedal.  For this reason, I decided I would carry on to the office on the bike.  I set off down Green Lanes and made it up both hills with relative ease, even though I still hadn't sorted my left foot out.  Then, just as I was coming up to Newington Green (and when I had already moved into the right hand turn lane) two things happened.  The first was that I managed to get my left foot in the clip, just as I was coming up to a red light, of course.  The second was that something hit me in the right shin and I realised that it must have been one of the bolts from the right toe clip, which was hanging off the front of the pedal at a jaunty angle and, when the lights changed and I pushed off, began fouling the tarmac with every revolution - all this on an enormous, busy roundabout that I was turning right on.  I had to stop immediately, and I managed to get safely onto a pedestrian refuge (with much cursing, apologising and signalling).  I have no idea whether the problem was that I hadn't done it up tight enough (likely), that the front of the pedal being ever so slightly bent was causing it to undo (also likely) or that the bolt was faulty (less likely, but still possible), or maybe a combination of some or all of these things.

And then I saw it, like a gold aura-ed mirage on the other side of the road - PUSH Cycles.  I figured I had two choices here - I could either take off the offending toe clip and sort it out later, or I could pop into PUSH and see if they would sell me a bolt to replace the lost one.  I decided that if I didn't get it sorted straight away, I might write off the whole toe clip project and never get it sorted, so I went into PUSH (well, not actually inside, I just sort of hovered in the doorway) and asked the chap if he had a bolt that would fix my problem.  He took a look at it, went off and found a bolt, discovered it was too short, went off and found a longer one, fitted it, tightened the other bolt on that clip and then checked and tightened the ones on the left side as well - I asked him how much I owed him and he shrugged his shoulders.  I suggested that I would mention him in my blog as compensation for his time and the bolt and that went down well, so I went on my merry way.  It seems that at the moment I'm spending quite  a lot of time both in bike shops and telling the world how wonderful bike shops are, but this was special - such a nice man and such great service and kindness in helping me out.  I will definitely be revisiting PUSH.*

Once I'd walked round the remaining bit of Newington Green, I was back on my bike and had a fairly innocuous remainder of the journey (other than a 271 bus deciding to pull out in front of me from a side road - the 271 doesn't even usually go that way) until I got into the City and discovered that Moorgate was closed; the Crossrail project often causes road closures and you can never be sure whether a given road will be open at a particular time - it reminds me in some ways of the staircases moving about at Hogwarts.  However, this led to me finding a better route to the office by going straight across a junction I normally turn left at and then taking a left further on - much less busy and no buses.  I'm still a bit hit and miss on getting my left foot into the clip, but I was improving pretty consistently from Newington Green to the office, so I'm confident I'll get there.

I had started my watch when I got onto Green Lanes at the Manor House junction.  When I got to work, it said I had been going for 41 minutes - this included the time spent at the bike shop, walking around the remaining bit of Newington Green and getting stuck in traffic in the City, and I was amazed at how quick I'd been.  My average speed was only 6.4 mph (but I was stationary for probably about 5 or 7 minutes and walking for another 2 or 3), but my top speed was 19.4 mph.

The measured part of this morning's cycle was 7.08km, taking my cycling total to 130.04km.  Hopefully I'll have a less eventful journey on the way home!

*I should say here that PUSH Cycles is, of course, a business and is not in the habit of just giving away free stuff, so please don't try it on - it's a really nice shop run by nice guys, though, so do go and see them.  I should also say that I'm not in the habit of offering mentions on my blog in return for free stuff, so please don't try it on with me, either!!

Life in the Fast Lane

Today is a swimming day.  I got up early, as usual for a swimming day, got my act together and went to the station to get my usual train to the pool.  There is a tube strike today.  One of the reasons that James and I chose to live where we do is that we would not be reliant upon the tube to get to work.  We live very close to the mainline train line and, as a result, we are still able to get into the City when the Underground is not working.  This morning, however, both the train I normally get and the train after were so full that I could not physically get onto them.  I contemplated going home, unpacking and repacking everything and getting on my bike, turning it into a cycling day, but then realised that my saddle was still attached to the turbo trainer and I didn't know where my gloves were, so my turnaround time might not be that small.  I stuck to the train and got on the next one, which was reminiscent of a cattle truck, half an hour after the time of the train I was supposed to be getting.  This was too late for me to get my swim in before work, so I headed straight to the office and contemplated my next (training) move.

A chap I saw on Whitecross Street
I only ever walk the other way,
so I hadn't seen him before!

I had a look at the swimming pool website and ascertained that it would be open and not full of lessons, water polo or frogmen at the time I would be likely to leave work, so decided to go on the way home.  It was a little odd going the "wrong" way up Whitecross Street and through St. Luke's to the pool.  Once I was changed and in, I briefly regretted my decision as, at about 7.10 p.m., it was packed.  Every lane was full.  I started my warm up in the slow lane, doing 2 x 120m of breaststroke.  By the time I was half way through the first part of my main set (540m of arms only - it was supposed to be 5 x 100m, but it morphed into an odd patchwork of sets as I had to let others go before me and I swam an extra length because I needed to do an odd number, which would have made me finish in the deep end and would have been suboptimal) the pool had thinned out considerably and very few people were still there.

All of a sudden, the penny dropped - it was ladies' night (or, rather, a women only session) and all the men had left the pool at 7.30 p.m.; there was a blind down completely blocking the training pool from view so that those who are at an all-ladies session for religious or cultural reasons could be attended by an all-female staff and not seen by any male staff who happened to be around.  The main pool, however, even though the swimmers were all female, had a male lifeguard.  One poor chap had used the automatic check-in kiosk in the lobby (so didn't speak to any staff at the desk) and almost made it into the pool before the lifeguard told him he perhaps might feel out of place in all-female company.  He didn't look like he would be bothered, but left without a fuss.

The spread of swimmers in the pool was heavily weighted toward the slower end of the dolphin spectrum and, when I finished my arms-only set, I realised that while the double-width slow lane was reasonably busy, the two medium lanes had only a couple of swimmers in each and the fast lane was home to a lone backstroker.  I also saw that the swimmers in the medium lanes weren't really going very fast at all so I thought "why not?" - I went in the fast lane.  Yes, the  fast lane!  I did 7 x 60m, alternating hard and easy effort, and I was going at a slightly faster pace than the backstroker, but we were about a length apart, so we passed each other midway down each length, but neither ever caught the other.  It was somewhat serendipitous.  I don't know if it will ever be repeated when chaps are in the pool, but I still feel like I've achieved something.  The last bit of my session was 4 x 30m (2 x breaststroke and 2 x best stroke front crawl).

Today's session highlighted the problem with training in a 30m pool as, in spite of a bit of scaling for the longer pool length, I ended up swimming significantly more than I was supposed to (10% more, in fact).  Today's tally was 1.32km, taking my total swimming sum to 11.68km!  Tomorrow is a cycling day, which may involve some more firsts - check back to find out what I've got planned!

Going the Distance

Finally, I've managed to say that I'm going to do something on a particular day and actually do it on that day!  Today was a swimming day.  In spite of all my ranting and raving about how much I disliked Clissold Leisure Centre the last time we went, we went there again on the grounds that it takes half the time to get there as it does to get to Ironmonger Row. (By the way, the reason the weather would have mattered in deciding where to go had we gone yesterday was that there was a "Pets in the Park" event at Clissold Park that we thought it might be nice to wander through before or after our swim, but we weren't going to be doing that if it was rainy (and so we would have gone to Ironmonger Row instead) and then we ended up going today after all, so the weather didn't matter.)

We wandered through the park on the way to the pool and saw the deer mooching about. Once we got to the pool, we were surprised at how quiet it was.  However, there were several groups of kids about - this is, generally speaking, not a problem at all but the main pool at Clissold is supposed to be lane swimming only and the lanes are clearly marked - the kids didn't seem to be interested in adhering to the lane-swimming etiquette and the pool attendant was more interested in trying to pick up her water bottle (which she'd dropped) with a long-handled water scoop without having to climb down from her lifeguard's (high) chair than she was in making sure that the pool rules were adhered to.  Thankfully, there was a shift change halfway through our swim and the new, fresh pool attendant was not taking any nonsense.  James spied her walking along the pool side swinging her whistle in an officious manner and knew immediately that she was going to do something about the kids, who by now had started bombing into the pool.  They were told, in no uncertain terms, that if any of them did anything they shouldn't again, then all of them would be thrown out of the pool. After that, swimming became a lot more pleasant.

I have to say that while the kids were annoying, I did think that with the pool being as generally quiet as it was, the staff could have given over one of the lanes to splashing about for confident swimmers (bearing in mind the pool is 2m deep the whole way across) - that said, at Clissold, you can't see what's going on in the training pool from the main pool (it even has separate changing rooms!), so I've no idea how busy it was and, hence, why these kids had chosen to go in the main pool instead.

Today's session was quite tough.  James decided to follow what I did (without having done the seven weeks of training I've already done).  He agreed that it was tough.  We started with 4 x 50m breaststroke as a warm up.  Then we were on to 4 x 25m crawl kicks - the only floats that were available for use looked like they had been hewn from the polystyrene blocks that protect new appliances in their boxes and then someone had chewed around the edges.  Then it was the main event.  This was the first time I had to swim the race distance of 400m without stopping.  Seven weeks ago I was dithering about whether I thought I could train myself to swim 400m of front crawl in the 3 months available and contemplating that it might be rather easier to just do breaststroke.  Today I swam 400m of front crawl without stopping, a full five weeks before the event.  In addition, I had already swum 300m before I even embarked on this bit of the session.  To say I'm feeling proud of myself is an understatement.

After the main set, I still had 3 x 100m arms only to do and then 50m breastroke and 50m best stroke front crawl.  Once that was done, I did another couple of lengths while waiting for James to finish what he was doing, taking today's tally to 1.15km and my overall swimming total to 10.36km.  Over 10km!  That's a blimming long way!  If you think my 10km of swimming deserves a reward of a few quid for Marie Curie Cancer Care, please click the Justgiving link on the right hand side of the page and make a donation - I'm not far off the £100 required for me to post that picture of me in my oh-so-flattering swimming hat...