Group Training

We're all going for our first group training session tomorrow.
We're being accompanied by Gerry Robson (Kerry's Dad and a proper swimming coach) so we'll definitely be put through our paces.

Hopefully Gerry will be able to help us with our technique. I have an image of myself suddenly being able to fly through the water with new found efficiency once my stroke is corrected. However, I suspect it may be a tad harder than that.

It'll also be quite hard cos I've just spent 10 days on holiday drinking too much and eating too much. That's going to be my excuse anyway.

London Fields Lido

I went for my first outside session this morning in Hackney Lido.

It's the only lido in London that's heated apparently. The water was at 22 degrees, so colder than a normal pool, but a fair bit warmer than the Channel.

The most unpleasant thing was the air temperature - which was 7 degree and provided a really good incentive not to stand around resting too much at the ends.

I definitely like the 50 metre lengths of a lido better. I found I got into a far more sustainable rhythm than a normal pool, which feels really stop-start in comparison. There's also lots of really good swimmers there, so I felt a good bit of indirect peer pressure to try to look good and go faster.

In short, I recommend it.

Monday Training Session

Somehow I managed to drag myself out of bed early enough to get some swimming in before work.

I managed 15 x 100m @ 2 mins (well, not quite. I took a sneaky longer-than-I-should-have break at the tenth set and slipped quite a lot after that).
Then did the drills and stuff from the week 3 programme - 3 x 75m (Kick-drill-full stroke)

Blog what sessions you manage to fit in this week.

Blogging the Channel

On Friday night, in a curry house on Brick Lane we decided to blog our swimming efforts. We felt the need that more people should know about our hungover training sessions, days at work with water in your ears so you can't hear anything and our fury with old women doing breaststroke to keep their hair dry who don't get out of the bloody way.

Basically, all the general stuff that's going to make swimming the Channel difficult.

One of the things that really caught my imagination (read: inspired real fear) was the descriptions of swimming through stinging jelly fish shoals that choose to hang out between England and France.

That's why I was delighted to hear that this year will see record jelly fish blooms in Europe because of a mild winter: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/29/spain.conservation

Anyone got any tips for warding off jelly fish?