Do The Right Thing

Robbie and I had both wangled early starts for the race - I was in at No. 19, setting off at 7:39, and he was No. 23, two minutes behind me. Fat Robbie’s a slightly faster swimmer than me, so I’d reckoned that we’d both be out of the water together.
Not so. Last year my […]

Filed under: Swim, Friends, NE31 Tri Club | 5 Comments »

I came last. By, oh, about two or three minutes. And behind Fat Bloke. Fat Bloke, who was doing breast stroke, with his goggles perched on top of his head, and never once even putting his face in the water. NOT that I’ve anything against Fat Bloke (or, indeed any fat blokes reading or that […]

Filed under: Triathlon, Swim, Cleveland Steelman | 3 Comments »

Last Monday of the month means a 400m time trial at the NE31 Tri club. Not much to say about it, other than I’m now officially the slowest swimmer in the club. Of course, I can tell myself that I’ve been training for distance rather than speed, but it’s still annoying to be right at […]

Filed under: Triathlon, Swim, NE31 Tri Club | 6 Comments »

With only just over a week to go ’till race day, I’m starting to feel the pressure. Nothing I can’t handle - what happens next Saturday is now largely decided by the training I’ve done up to now. As the man said,
Alea iacta est
But it’s still kinda irritating - every time I think about the […]

Filed under: Triathlon, Swim, Cleveland Steelman | 2 Comments »

Last night at the NE31 Triathlon club was a great swim session - lots of endurance work at my race pace (i.e. not too fast then!). We did a 300m warmup, followed by two sets of 7×100m. The pace was set by the fastest guy in our lane, who swam at his target 400m pace […]

Filed under: Swim, NE31 Tri Club | No Comments »

It was one of those deeply unpleasant sessions at the NE31 Tri club last night. Too much work with the kickboard for my liking. I had a word with our coach about this after the session, and he says that my problem with kicking is that I either splay my legs (i.e. add drag), or […]

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I got up late last Friday, so didn’t get to Tynemouth pool ’till about 7:45. I found that this has a distinct advantage - all the ‘early birds’ were already getting out, so the laned off section was almost empty - for the final half of my swim, I was sharing the lane with only […]

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A really tough swim at the NE31 Tri club last week - it was a 400m warm up, and then 2 x 800, with the first set on hand paddles. I’m obviously not doing things right with these - I ended up with a really bad stitch in my left side about half way through […]

Filed under: Swim, NE31 Tri Club | No Comments »

So I was so impressed with the pool in Montpellier that I persuaded my 15 year-old nephew to come for a swim . . . a thousand metres. For him, this was a BIG deal. So we broke the task down into manageable chunks:
1000m = only 10 laps of a 50m pool
1000m = only 20 […]

Filed under: Swim, Family, France | No Comments »

On the second day of our holiday, I did some more multi-tasking. The whole family was going into Montpellier to visit the aquarium. That’s at the end of one of the city’s tram lines . . . and only a few stops up the line is the swimming pool. So while the family were looking […]

Filed under: Swim, Family, France | No Comments »