The one where I blogged twice in a week

I discussed last weekend my journey to Huub where I got my Wetsuit. On the Saturday I had a meeting with my swimming coach Chris, where we discussed my training plan for the next two weeks – in the build up to the Etwall Sprint triathlon. I have been given a series of drills for the swim leg, which truth-be-told is what is worrying me. In my lesson we did a couple of dry runs of the 300m swim leg of the Tri and I found it incredibly tough, to the point that I had to stop several times. I could not string together more than a couple of lengths. I’m starting to get quite anxious about the 300m swim, but Chris had an idea. I was to alternate between Swimming 1 length front crawl and then 1 length breaststroke. This was a big deal to me, I knew I could do 300m using the breaststroke length as ‘active recovery’.

I discussed with Chris my training plan and we agreed that open water training would form part of my drills. I had a wetsuit and the required kit and was able to go to a local outdoor swim venue called Spring Lakes. If truth be told I was pretty terrified of the thought of being in an open lake in cold, unheated water. My mate Rob said he’d come with me as he is a strong swimmer. Arrival at the centre was straight forward and the parking was good. The staff greeted you at their cabin and there were 3 pools that you could swim in. I opted for the smaller lake! Getting into the water was weird – your feet are cold, but your body is kept warm by the wetsuit. My issue of sinking legs was improved by the buoyancy of the 3:5mm wetsuit.

The smaller lake was the closet one to the centre huts and has 4 buoys which set out the water course. The first buoy was near the edge and there was a lot of water plant life, which freaked the inexperienced Carl out. I struggled with the feeling of plants on my arms and feet ha-ha. I will need to get used to this though for Ironman!

Swimming around the buoys was awesome though. Me and rob agreed to swim breaststroke to one and then front crawl to the next alternatively. I did 2 laps using this technique, interestingly each lap was 450m or 150% of my target! My final lap I was determined to front crawl to each buoy and this I did! I needed 20 seconds rest from each buoy mind, but I’m claiming this as a success 😊.

Then at home later in the day we had some drama. What started off as a normal and exciting delivery ended in a bit of calamity. Back at Easter time we decided to do the garden in our house. The holiday to Germany was cancelled and we had time to kill as we were off for Easter week and we decided to begin the garden. Well the plan was to have a summer house at the bottom of the garden to be used as a gym, but there was a huge Leadtime on delivery so we have been waiting literally months for this moment. Delivery was this weekend, the Lorry driver and Fork Lift operator it turned out was on his first day in the job – what could go wrong….