another amazing photo by www.jacqueline-rackham-photography.com
I do try to
make pages of my blog interesting for most people when I can, but today I
thought I should give an idea of what a few days of my triathlon training is
like for somebody with a fairly full life anyway and in the light of the
approach of my 80th birthday which even I find hard to believe. So,
non-sporty people should maybe just look at the pictures on this day’s blog, or
maybe look away altogether if they tire easily.
Friday
morning started much the same as every other Friday with the alarm going off at
5.20 am
This allows
us both to be ready to go to our swim session for 6.30 am start. My husband
Steve coaches the faster swimmers in what I call the Animals Lane! These are all people I see
under the water as much as above the surface.
For these early morning swim sets, three times a week, he swims in that
lane too but loses some of his own training but making sure that the rest of
his babies are working hard. There is not much rest at the end of each swim
before he is shouting GOOOO again. These days I swim just outside of that lane,
it is actually in the open area of the pool but most people do not want to swim
right next to the fast swimmers because its too splashy. So a friend or two of
mine and I swim in a very narrow stretch right next to the lane rope for the
most part. We do a deep push of at the ends after turning, passing under the
oncoming swimmer behind us and so we are still not taking more that one set of
shoulders width of water even though there may be three of us women training in
that narrow stretch.
The guys,
and a couple of women in Lane 1, are doing a distance or Ironman training swim
set and mine is aimed at Half Ironman distance, so the set itself, is around
1900 metres, plus there is a warm up, and for a swim down, I do about 300 metres
back stroke because I like to hold on to my backstroke since years ago I did
have a county record for 200 back at one time. Who know what life may throw out,
one day I may just be a swimmer and not a triathlete any more.
So after
the swim on Friday I did a turbo session on my own at home. Then some office
work, phone calls and emails and stuff like that.
Saturday
morning with another strong wind blowing, there was a turbo again but harder
than Friday and Steve was there to crack the whip. He was on his turbo trainer
bike next to me but just spinning since he had had a hard week at work. I was
sweating buckets and being told what gear to change to and how long to go in
that gear. The session was 90 minutes.
Saturday
evening we have our club session with some of the same but also some other
swimmers. In my lane, there were four swimmers working to this schedule and
being told when to go by Steve rather than follow a printed schedule on
poolside. The one hour set went like this:
400 mtr
warm up
1 x 400
metres
4 x 100
1 x 300
3 x 100
1 x 200
2 x 100
1 x 200
Swim down
Sunday
morning Steve and I went to Arundel
Park intending to do two
laps of a regular run there.
There was
another storm blowing just a strong as last Sunday was during Storm Freya, but
the wind coming roughly from the north instead of the south east as is more
usual. The run in Arundel
Park is off road for the
first half and mainly up hill, some is steeply up hill and muddy and slippery.
Once out of the park near the cathedral we are back on solid footing again and
almost level as far as the top gate of the Castle, then downhill on the High
Street as far as the post office. Then the last section is a flat footpath by
the moat beneath the towers of the castle all the way back to Swanbourne Lake.
Then comes the start of lap two. At the end of that, we were both pleased since
we were faster on the second lap by about twenty seconds and that is an
improvement for us both. It was a PB for that course for the first couple of
months of this year.
Although it
was a breathtakingly windy day it was mostly bright and did not start raining
until we had go in the car and started or drive home for a nice hot bath and
change into clean clothes. I had to tidy up a bit and chase the hoover around
because this was the day for the once a month Poetry group that I host. We call
ourselves Scribblers. My friends would be arriving at 2pm when we just about
had time to bring every chair in our little cottage downstairs for the group
reading. We are a mixed group and there are only ably twenty people on the
email list for newsletters to be sent to, so this means that on any one
occasion there will be between seven to eleven of us, just a nice cosy
comfortable amount of people in one room of a small house.
We bring
anything we have written on the last month and read it to the group. We also
read anything else that we want to and that is widely varied, e.g. This time I
read a couple of my own and then read the first poem that ever fired my
imagination and made me a slave to poetry. At my senior school there were two
most marvellous teachers who influenced me enormously between them. One was Mrs
Thomas the poetry teacher who also mentored a speech choir that met weekly and we
entered festivals and such. The second and no less of a dedicated wonder was
Miss Feltham the music teacher who taught music (obviously), there was an
actual music class, but also gave her time to choir practice and on a rainy day
lunch time would pass our a pile of music books and play the piano for a sort
of requests time for those interested.
Mrs Thomas
read ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ in the way that it would have been read at the
time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote it in about 1842. That was a bolt out of
the sky moment for me, a ton of bricks jaw dropper. In looking it up recently,
it stated that he was paid $25 for it, quite a lot of money at the time I
suppose. I had read it to Steve in the week, when I had him captive on a work
day, driving on a motorway. He advised me not to do ‘The silly voice’, I
compromised and read it seriously but not as dramatically as Mrs Thomas. I am
after all only me and not her.
So at
school I was easily able to attend practice (because my parents were not home
from work until after 5p) with the Speech Choir, the school choir practice and
due to the fact that I attended both a ballet as well as a tap and acrobatic
dance school I was also in the folk dance group. Oh yes and the Little Theatre school
in the holidays. Best not to mention Maths and Science!
So there we
are, a weekend with Daf and of course Steve who cares for me in a thousand ways,
one of which is to cook me the very best food to keep me healthy, give me
energy and to delight the palate and the eyes.
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