Entries for next years Great Swim series are open already. Christmas is not a great time to start contemplating squeezing into an overly snug wetsuit, the annual quality street box is already half empty and the strawberry creams are not improving my silhouette.
Christmas is a time for trying out new gadgets though so it’s time I reviewed my latest toy.
I was sent a swimming watch from Swimovate to try out for a week. It promised to count all my laps for me, freeing my mind to concentrate on higher level issues such as “what should I cook for tea?” and “did I remember to put any Stella in the fridge?”
It does more than that of course, storing my lap history and providing historical data such as distance, stroke rate, calories and efficiency.
It was the counting bit that appealed most to me though. I am always surprised at how inept I am at counting lengths. I start well enough, reciting 1, 1, 1 in my head til I reach the end and turn. Of course I then move on to 2, 2, 2 cos I’m bright and can count but I’m also easily bored so I start adding variety like 2, 2 and the next lap will be 3, next is 3, next is 3. If course when I get to 3 I think blimey that number is familiar I’ve already counted it. Then I have to go through the odd even calculation and match it to the direction of my travel. Basically I never get as far as 10 laps before I’ve stressed myself out and felt the need to re-enrole in kindergarten.
So it’s a lap counter, but a pretty good one. Beyond the first button press you don’t have to bother again until it’s time to get out of the pool. The motion sensors apparently pick up on the drift portion of the stroke at the change round. It will pick up tumble turns and your more sedate stop and turn technique. Provided you don’t change strokes within a length it will supposedly maintain accuracy.
I did my best to fool it but it was 100% accurate up to 16 lengths, beyond that I’m sure the watch maintained its accuracy but I didn’t and decided to just free my mind of the counting. Swimming with a blank mind is really rather freeing, it feels so much more like running.
It’s given me an efficiency rating of 73 which equates to below average which I suppose will be about right. They measure efficiency in terms of distance covered per stroke and I’ve always felt that I swim on the spot anyway.
It would be quite useful to monitor efficiency gains if you were trying to work on your stroke but I didn’t get to play with it long enough to see how responsive it was to minor improvements.
The battery is supposed to last for 1 year after which you have to send it back to the company to be replaced. I suppose that shouldn’t be a big problem provided they have a quick turnaround.
You can’t currently use it as a distance monitor for outdoor swims because it multiplies pool length by laps but I have picked up on some internet murmurings that suggest that might be about to change.
It could do with an overhaul of the user interface, moving through the history screens required me to pull out the instruction leaflet twice but all in all it’s a pretty good adition to the sporting gadgetry world and costs around £69 from Swimovate.
September 15, 2009 at 10:33 pm · Filed under Event, Swimming
So the big day arrived, not quite the day that every girl dreams of, but as days go it was big enough to require the same sort of dietary preparations. 6 weeks of off and on Stella abstinence brought me to a point where I was prepared to at least attempt a public shoe-horning of my wobbly bits into the rubber encasement.
Sunday was a hot day and the combined sweat of 2402 lady swimmers had condensed on the marquee roof and was starting to drip onto the dressers below. Other peoples sweat, wet skin and rubber only combine to create more stress and more sweat. I successfully directed my right foot into the wetsuit but then started hopping around and cursing my full English breakfast as I tried to squeeze my left leg through my left arm hole.
There was no time for this sort of faffing, we were late and were already supposed to be sitting in the lake “warming” up. Despite expecting the seams to burst at any moment leaving me pink and vulnerable like a lizard shedding its skin, I did actually manage to yank up the zipper. After patching all my grasping finger nail holes with a puncture repair kit I waddled out in full glory looking like a fat, black, naked lady with a severe nicotine withdrawal problem.
Not exactly my best look but here we go – that’s me next to the tall skinny guy, who I will not be swimming with next year. I’m going to find myself some fat friends.
As per last year I secreted myself towards the back of the pack in a vain attempt to avoid mid-lake battles. This year though I wasn’t swimming in the last wave and had to cope with the chasing hoards of sub 30 minute swimmers.
I had a few new strategies for this year’s attempt at the Great North Swim. Firstly I was going to remember my nose clip and then stick my head in the water, I wasn’t going to bother much with my legs as they’d proved useless in unscientific pool timing tests, I was going to wear shoes (?) and finally I wasn’t going to get asthma.
The nose clip really helped as you’d expect and I’m still sure that legs are overrated in swimming; I tried to observe every swimmer that passed me and a good deal of the sub 30 minute swimmers did not appear to be kicking with their legs. Of course they may have been kicking like crazy up til that point but its good enough evidence for me.
Probably the most significant decision in my overall performance was to give the asthma a wide berth. No idea how I did that, I took on heavy quantities of caffeine in the run up to the event, stuck my head in cold water a few times but there also seemed to be less motor fuel hanging around on the surface of lake this year and that may have had something to do with it.
So all in all, I had another pootle round a stunning lake, positively enjoyed myself for a few hundred metres and came home with a new pb, knocking 10 minutes off last years time and dragging myself out of the bottom 1% and well into the top 96% of all competitors. Result!
The only disappointment was that I managed to look decidedly camp in my sprint finish photo, not that I need to share that with anybody.
Actual stats:
Time – 1:01:57
Overall – 4392/4579
Age/gender – 366/385
As Dan can’t be arsed to keep a record of his times, I will jot them down here for prosperity:
The Great North Swim is now only a matter of weeks away. I’ve been swimming regularly but to be honest, the distance is the least of my worries.
I pulled the wetsuit out of the cupboard last month, dusted out the moth balls and then attempted the big squeeze……
Not good.
I forced the zip up but couldn’t straighten my arms and panic ensued within 30 secs. With no body glide I was falling all over the bedroom trying to trap the rubber under something solid so I could fight my way free.
I immediately pulled out my spreadsheet and started the calorie controlled route to a not so snug wetsuit but four weeks later I’m scouring the spreadsheet for dodgy formulas. Something must have gone wrong somewhere because I’m only about 2 ounces down.
I’m running almost daily and have now stepped into the serious measures zone. Stella has been eradicated (apart from Blog writing evenings) but if the scales don’t start playing fair I’ll have to join the bald penguin preservation society.
If I slice off both arms (rubber ones obviously), I’ll be able to move my shoulders and I’ll provide a new skin for at least two bald penguins, maybe even four, if they’re short.
As that seems an increasingly likely option at this late stage I thought I better get used to some cold weather swimming. So today I finally managed a trip to Tooting Bec Lido.
At 93 metres a length its practically open water swimming and the temperature was shocking enough to remind me that freezing mountain lakes will be unbearable without full body rubber protection.
I better make sure I don’t write too many blogs between now and September 13th.
I’ve been promising myself since March that I will start swimming again very soon.
The Great North Swim was approaching at a fair ole rate and given that it threatened to kill me last year with previously unknown asthma issues I didn’t think I should take my training commitment too lightly.
Good intentions were fine back in March, but its July now so I suppose I couldn’t have taken a lighter approach to training if I’d actually tried.
I have now swum though, so it’s all back on track.
Public swimming is a funny old do. Can’t say I actually like it that much. I like the swimming bit but other wet people can be so annoying.
It’s an absolute war of wills. Two swimmers fighting over a single strip of pool, locked on a course for a head on collision, determined not to give an inch til one smacks the other in the chin. A slow motion, watery, game of chicken.
Why do they always insist on swimming in my lane? I make a careful assessment when I get into the pool to determine a clear line that I might be able to squeeze up and down in but when I look up after 3 laps all the newcomers seem to have chosen my lane to try and muscle in on.
September 30, 2008 at 2:28 pm · Filed under Cycling, Event, Road
I am such a social cretin before an event and watching the city boys arrive at the coach station in their pin striped suits and titanium s-bar bikes didn’t go anyway towards making me feel at home.
I cheered up a bit on arrival at Blenheim when friendly faces appeared out of the crowd and I was reassured that Emma’s Dave hadn’t abandoned me to do the race on my own. Shame Trinny and Susannah weren’t there though; they would have been able to advise me that the short and dumpy tie style wasn’t going to do much for my physique. They might also have mentioned that a thick woollen jacket wasn’t the best sporting wear for the hottest day of the year.
I had received tie training lessons some months ago, in a pub and even through the Stella haze I could remember some of the specifics of the double Nelson knot. Or maybe it wasn’t a Nelson, that sounds like a wrestling move and that was another night and a completely different sort of pub. Anyway, my tie, it ended up in some form of quadruple knotting affair which may even have been stylish if only I were tall and lanky.
So with the race about to start we’d had to lay out our bikes in the folded position, on numbered markers. I was going in the first wave, with Dave two waves and 4 minutes behind me. With the horn sounded we ran to the Bromptons, unfolded, pushed to the track and then set off.
I can’t believe that I’ve gone to so much trouble, practically having my gps surgically embedded in my wrist, and yet “forgot” to set the flippin thing off for the race. Now you are just going to have to take my word for it when I say it was HILLY. Big, long hills!
I may have mentioned before that I don’t do hills, not uphills anyway, but with Dave a mere 4 minutes behind me I didn’t have a lot of choice and had to keep pushing. When I finished the first 6.5km loop I came really close to throwing up on the corner, I thought it would be a slip hazard though and with Dave still behind me it could be seen as unsporting.
One of the guys in my wave had a video camera on his helmet and captured some of the beauty of the course. I was breathing so hard, sweating gallons and concentrating too much on the waves of nausea that I didn’t notice my surroundings.
It’s a bit noisy so I suggest you turn the volume right down, but before you get bored, pull the slider across to 4 minutes and wait for me to appear like a bat out of hell. He managed to capture almost a full minute of my backside flying down the hill with my coat tails flapping in an aerodynamic fashion.
I crossed the line in front of Dave but the gap could be measured by Brompton lengths rather than minutes but we both looked rather worse for wear.
The results are just in:
Lap 1 15:48
Lap 2 16:57
Total for the 13km 32:45 (Dave’s time was 30:26)
In terms of positions I’m 268/364 overall or 21/44 for the women. So I’m actually in the top 50% for a sport! It beats swimming.
September 16, 2008 at 3:05 pm · Filed under Event, Swimming
How cold?!
I eased myself gently into the lake until I slipped on a hunk of plankton and ended up bobbing some where near my ears with a foul expression on my face. The lake was freezing and I had the pleasure of sitting in it for the bizarrely named “warm up”. There’s only one way this could be termed a warm up and the thought of 220 swimmers peeing in unison didn’t improve my look of disgust.
Actual temp was 15.1′C or 59 ‘F for those that understand these things.
I started shivering so got out pretty sharpish but then wished myself back in the water as I now had to hang around in front of the film camera feeling naked or at least a black rubberised version of naked which isn’t much better.
I was in the final wave so with no swimmers following up the rear ready to lap me, I faced the decided risk of coming in dead last. Or just dead, which I suppose would be marginally worse.
Not being a terribly confident drowner, I thought it would be best to steer clear of the main body of swimmers, so swam wide and started at the back. Speedracer keeps terrifying me with tales of swimming right over the top of slower obstructions and I couldn’t trust myself not to start fighting in the middle of the lake if anyone tried that technique on me.
As it was I quickly found myself alone, paddling serenely in the middle of this massive lake enjoying the backdrop of mountains and the occasional break through of sun. It was really quite pleasant and if it wasn’t for the inconvenience of being in some kind of race I would have liked to have taken my time.
Not that my swimming was fast in any way. My overly buoyant wetsuit wasn’t playing on this outing and refused point blank to lift my legs to the surface. Thankfully I hadn’t cut the buttocks out to fashion a pair of chaps or I would have had to swim round in the walking position.
By the end of the first half I started to notice a few problems, my chest was tightening up and I developed a cough. My lungs seemed to be filling with fluid and I was struggling to catch my breath, then the wheezing started and I was convinced I’d developed asthma. There were 3 of us together at this point and the swimmer nearest me had developed a productive cough at about the same time. The safety canoeists swooped in like desert vultures and guided us home, with motivational snippets like, “only 35 more lengths of a pool to go”. 35 lengths was probably the max I’d swam in a long time so I wasn’t that convinced I’d achieve it while threatening to have my first ever asthma attack.
I rolled on to my back a few times to float and to try and relax my breathing but in the end it seemed like the best thing was to get the race over and done with so I could panic on dry ground. I thought I was proper last at this point so when I finally reached the end I thought I better put on a bit of a sprint finish. This photo has to be one of the best action shots ever taken of me – thanks Tanya.
The satellite image shows Lake Windermere in all its glory, the next day as Dan and I drove down past its banks we flushed with pride at the thought of having swum across it. I have actually drawn our mile route on the image in it seems far from traversing the lake, we managed only a delicate nibble off a small corner. One of the rescue canoeists was telling me he had swum the full length of the lake – a mere 10 miles and another woman at the Great North Swim had swum it in both directions.
It still feels good though and now my breathing has recovered I can start making plans for next year, it wouldn’t take much training to ensure myself a whopping pb.
Stats for the event:
Time: 1:12:34
Position: 1779/1796 which puts me in the top 99% or if you prefer the bottom 1%. It is almost thrilling to discover that I am quite possibly a better runner than I am a swimmer.
The faster swimmer came home in 0:17:03 which is a bit galling.
I’ve been quiet for a while but I’m still out here, running and swimming a bit.
Swimming is still my biggest concern, I made it to the pool on Sunday thinking I’d sneak in a mile but I got bored and bruised after 1 km and called it quits. I was trapped in an anticlockwise convoy and every time I made a move to overtake the breaststroker in the group she would wait til I approached her shoulder and then dislocate her hip in order to give me a good sharp kick in the tits. I suppose I should prepare myself for much worse in the open water melee.
No more time for prep though, I’m just packing my bag for the long trek up North to the start of the Great North Swim. I’m a little apprehensive but that’s no surprise, I’m always in a state of dread before the big day.
The event report will follow but in the meantime I’m going to share the latest “Here I am” video from NikeWomen. They are publishing a series of animated films highlighting the mental and physical journey of a series of high profile athletes. The one below is of the triple jumper Simona La Mantia, it’s pretty good – moving, strong and it quite makes me wish I could jump above the clouds.
I’m looking forward to the one from sprinter Nicola Sanders which will be released shortly.
Lesson No 1: Scrap any plans for cross channel swimming attempts.
Swimming in the sea is tough. It started well, the wetsuit protected me from the staggering chill but the moment I put my face in the water I ingested enough salt to raise my blood pressure to alarming levels. I quickly raised my head and adopted the side to side waggle that gets me nowhere very fast.
(I do appear in this photo – search for the black dot)
Lesson No 2: I do not require any additional buoyancy in my backside.
What with the head wiggle and the 3mm rubber padding I felt like I was trying to swim in the yoga bow position. I couldn’t seem to keep my legs in the water and am seriously considering cutting the buttocks out of my wetsuit and turning it in to a fancy set of chaps.
Lesson No 3: Waves are for surfer dudes.
I bobbed up and down fairly happily until I started seeing the incoming waves breaking on their way towards me.
Then the panic started.
I went out twice over the weekend, trying out different areas of the beach in search of calm deep water but only managed a cumulative distance of 1.5km.
I need to get myself in the pool next week and start training, I also need to get over my reluctance to put my head in open water but I’m not sure how to practice that without sticking my face in puddles.
My running seems to be oscillating wildly between run one, love one, hate one. Today was time for another “love one”, thankfully.
I wish you could tell how you’re going to feel before you set off, when I get a duff run I feel like throwing in the towel and quitting, these are runs to avoid. Today I felt the starting of a cold so nearly didn’t bother going out but it turned out to be the sort of run that keeps me buzzing about the sport for ages. I’ve set myself up for a good weekend now I’m sure.
I drew up my half-marathon plan a few weeks ago and opted for a simple Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday plan. I hit problems the moment I transferred this to my pre-existing diary full of appointments (be-fitting my social butterfly status). Training plans clashed with life this weekend as I’m heading off to the coast to try out my wetsuit. This is a vital arrangement as I haven’t been in the pool since December and need to see if the 1 mile open water carnage otherwise known as the Great North Swim is a viable option.
So, running plans were randomly jiggled and resulted in me having to go out and pull off a 7-miler.
7 miles is an awkward distance for me. My commute is a perfect 6-miler and not much would persuade me to run half a mile beyond my final destination and back again. My other running routes tend to involve ever increasing loops of the Thames but the river fording points are limited and so throw up huge psychological tests or bridges that I seem too weak to resist.
I opted to run as far as I could away from my flat and then loop back round through Richmond Park. I loaded SteppenWolf onto the iPod and fortunately it kept me occupied for about 4 miles before I realised I hadn’t a flipping clue what was going on. By that time I’d reached the point of no return and had no choice but to push on forward.
I find it a little concerning that I have to actively mess with my own head in order to achieve simple training plans but I won’t lose sleep over it. At least I’ve found another good route with limited options for bailing out.
Well this half-marathon (or two) isn’t going to run itself, so I exploited the refreshing drizzle today to enjoy a mid-week river run.
The drizzle was obviously fairly heavy as the river came out to join me.
With no fording points available, I got to enjoy the rest of the run with squelching socks and shoes – kept me cool though.
It’s just shy of 9 weeks to the GNR and 10 weeks to the second half marathon of my season. My aim is to maintain enough leg function after the GNR to at least make it to the start of the Royal Parks Half but preferably the finish. This challenge isn’t about time, its about dignity and standing on your own two feet without weeping too much.
As I’m not feeling like much of a runner at the moment, I’ve doctored the Non-Runners Marathon Trainer to form a mini half-marathon plan:
[TABLE=10]
I cleared Kew Bridge and found myself surrounded by ducks and swans swimming on my path, they were practically bobbing around the beer gardens. This particular beast attacked my soggy foot after posing for a photo.
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!
