five pound swimming pool hustle

This last week after near 300 miles of bike in the week before I focused on swimming and put in 4 sessions for a total of 14,000m. This has had repercussions, like I got cramp in my calf when only 10km into my long run on friday but also benefits.

The clear benefits are in this series of 3x (5x100m of 20,15,10 and 5 sec) Ok I was in a wetsuit but the times 1.22,1.20,1.25,1.24,1.25,1.24,1.25,1.28,1.24,1.26 etc are all under 1.30. This is the first time I have managed sub 1.30s more than 5 x in a row so I was well chuffed and happy that a sub 1 hr should be in the bag (allowing for waves and general idiocy on my behalf). The flip side of this was that the pool was busy with 2 lanes out of action so a lot of fastish swimmers crammed into half the space of normal.. and I loved it. In doing so I must of crossed a few other swimmers and generally been a bit irritating to some of the others in the lane... so maybe not such a good thing, but when you are on fire it seems to conquer all other considerations.

Now to the hustle. My youngest was challenged by the pool attendant to do the swim test (again... for the 6th time in 2 years). I said she could swim to the end of the pool and back no problem. The pool attendant looks her up and down and says no chance. I said you wonna bet he said £5.

2mins 50 secs and 100metres later we were £5 to the good, so there are benefits from taking them to all those swimming lessons. And a well happy daughter to boot.

I just hope that now London has a new Mayor we are notgoing to see drastic cuts in the funding of facilities like the local pool.

Otherwise things are looking good. Made a rash boast that april would see me over a 1000 bike miles, but reality kicked in and got to 800 something. If you want to read about someone who really puts the miles down read this.

http://web.mac.com/stevenlord/StevenLordsWebsite/Welcome.html

19 days to go to Lanza, currently doing some skin training in the sun. Looks like no running for a week though as calf is worse than I first thought, ran for 10 mins and it shut me down and I had to walk home.