All in a day’s training

Early enough Saturday’s morning, having already worked on my Duolingo Italian course for an hour and a half, well before Steve woke up.

He pretty soon, started to hassle me to get into my bike kit, since it was looking like a nice day for a ride again.

If you live in England you have to grab the nice days as they show, because the next one may very well not be tomorrow.

We worked hard on our ride, that is rarely about admiring the scenery in racing season, it was just a little short of thirty miles but useful enough to help with the growing stack piled under the belt, considering the events that we still have a fingers, legs and eyes crossed for in hope that they will go ahead.

 After a quick coffee in the garden with the cat on a lead, who only likes to be out in the garden when we are there too.

Otherwise, as soon as I put her out for a wander, she will start belly aching like kid shouting, “look what I’m doing”; which generally will be stomping over my geraniums or it seems like deliberately getting herself tied in knots around the table or a plant or Steve’s lounger, (I do not lie in the sun, not with my skin problems).

She knows that I will come and check what the problem is, and so mews loudly until I un-tangle her.

I have explained to her that this trick will not makes me ever let her go, so that she can climb over the garage and get either run over or kidnapped.

Ain’t gonna happen.

I can only be manipulated to a certain level, and after that I just take her off the lead and bring her in and feed her, after which, she will join me while I work on my Italian.

She finds this quite soothing and quickly falls asleep as close to me as possible.

The course keeps me from going completely ‘Gaga’ and I hope will be useful when we go to Ironman 70.3 Venice Jessolo that must be an outside possibility to be held at the end of September.

 

 Back to yesterday’s activities. So after an hour at home to gather swim kit and clothes for the planned time spent with friends after our swim.

We stuffed the ‘after clothes’ into the van and set off for the beach in our cozzie’s. Our usual beach is directly in front of the Littlehampton Wave Swimming and Sports centre.

Steve and I sat on the sea wall until our club swim friends Michelle and Brian arrived.

 

When I sea swim with Steve, I would have mentioned before, that I wear flippers and that helps with the difference in our swim speeds.

 Stephen quite a bit faster than me.

We have done a number of sea swim this summer and last -time; I had muttered that my flippers had seen better days and were perished and cracking here and there.

Before you could say “Knife”, a couple of days later a brand new, pair of shiny fins arrived via Amazon.  

They are longer than my old ones, so this swim was also a first test of swimming in my posh new flippers that are much longer that the cast-off pair.

Steve had to help me get the little devils on, with the waves bashing my back.

High tide was at 1.30 yesterday and I prefer to swim before rather than at High tide in Littlehampton which has a ferocious current. 

 

 Soon we were all in the water and swimming toward our start point at the end of groyne, a basket.

I had swum outwards first and then turned to swim toward the basket.

Steve usually catches up to me very quickly.

 

I swam at my usual easy pace because I like to enjoy a swim not just go in and thrash away, those days are long gone.

So, then I am swimming away and every now and again look up and sight on the basket.

This is, head on against the current, which normally means that you get back in half the time to your outward route.

 

After a while, at a point where I could see Steve swimming on my right side, he breathes to the left, so that is what he likes to do to keep me in sight.

After a while I noticed that the basket was not getting any closer. Brian and Michelle had taken a slightly more different direct line… I don’t swim that straight anyway and curve toward my left.

I stuck my head down again and battled on but still not getting anywhere.

 

At this point I started to wonder if the new flippers were not right for me, a lot bigger and heavier than the old one’s and new of course.

I never did get to the blickin’ basket. I stopped and spoke to Steve, saying I wasn’t getting anywhere and he said neither was he.

We hacked on for a while but then Steve saw that the two other very good swimmers had not got that far ahead but at least made it to the frickin’ basket.

 

At that time, I turned in to toward the shore. We have all been swimming at that spot for over twenty years but the water was running so fast that none of us could believe it, and on what should have been a straight swim into shore we drifted way to the west! On our way through the last bit of the swim there was a family with a big paddle board out for a bit of fun. I was a bit concerned about them since the man had got into the water and was trying to push the board against the current and was also getting further and further back. He did in the end guide it into shallow water with his wife and little girl, who thankfully had a big life-jacket on and was sitting on the front. It always worries me in summer that the tourists allow their children in the water on their own. It is normally a strong current but for whatever reason it was much stronger than usual.

 

My thought as I was swimming that either the new fins did not suit me or that I had gone badly off the boil swim wise.

It was a comfort to find that our friends had abandoned their intended long swim too, saying that in all the years they had not known the current to run so fast.

 

We all got dressed ready to walk to the start of the Arun 3.8 km Swim.

Steve and I had seen our friends working with Raw Energy Pursuits, setting up the finish area for the event on our way home from our morning ride, when we had stopped for a chat having not seen them for ages.

 

When we got to the river mouth, having walked along the seafront to that point the river it was simple raging in, quite extraordinary.  A little further along we saw the huge gravel ship that is by far the biggest vessel to comes into the river to unload a little way past the iron footbridge. Again, we had seen it unloading this morning out on our ride. It is massive and hard to believe it can even get in and out of the narrow mouth of the river, so it is a good entertaining thing to watch. The footbridge has to open to allow it out toward the sea. Amazing skill to take such a giant out and into our seaside water.

 

 

 The four of us stopped for tea and cake on the way along to the footbridge, where we planned to watch the swimming coming toward the finish of their daunting 3.8 km swim.

 

The start had to be delayed because one of the buses taking the swimmers to the start point only went and broke down arrghh!

How frustrating for the event organiser at Raw Energy Pursuits Mick Dicker, who usually has his events running so smoothly.

For us, it I gave time to chat in our distanced way outside the café. There was still a longish wait but we were in place on the bridge well before the first swimmers came by.

The lead canoe seemed to be having a bit of a job guiding the swimmer along who was bent on trying to swim wide on the curve.

The swimmer who came second took a much better line and gained a bit but not enough to catch the leader.

 

By this time, after the late start of course, the tide had well and truly turned and so instead of the slack water period, which is unreliable anyway in the very naughty River Arun, that is after all the second fasted river in the UK. I think the times may have been faster than previous years because of this.

 

It was a really lovely day all told, and useful too having had a good bike ride in the morning, a challenging sea swim and then a fair walk to the view point up the river and then back afterwards it must be a mile and a half both ways.

 

I hope Steve has found these results for me correctly.

 

Men

1^st Chris Cook

2^nd Andrew Gowland

3^rd Archie Strowgel

 

Women

1^st Tracy March

2^nd Dee Harmer

3^rd Nikki Gatland

 

 

 

Scribblers Poetry group reunion

 

 

Poetry group reunion soon, hopefully.

Earlier this week I sent out an email to the small poetry group Scribblers, that has not been allowed to meet in our home since March 8^th 2020.

It was a dreadful blow at the time, when at the start of the lockdown, everybody, for the sake of trying to stop the Covid monster ravaging the UK further,

were pretty much forced to stay home and not mix with other people, making the effort for ourselves as well as others.

It has been a horrible experience. Sheer torture.

 

Eighteen ghastly months have passed by us as we struggled, in our different ways to get through this test of our metal.

Recently I had started to think, well yes……. Thank Heaven! Things are slowly changing.

Well at least I was giving thanks that there was at long last, at least a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Hopefully, you poetry lovers, have missed our gatherings, at least a little bit.

It has seemed to me like the end of the world now and again, and my own poetry writing has faded to a shadow.

None the less, I did manage to at least keep my diary page going on line, though in the end it drifted back to not much more than once a week.

www.dafbelt.blogspot.co.uk

Daf’s Diary.

 

I hope it did not have had the same effect on everybody else.

I have struggled keeping Instagram and FB going but particularly FB has been a battle.

 

All I have been able to do with help from my home brewed time-management scheme, was at least keep very busy indeed.

Keeping my head on straight has been painful, since I so missed our social life. Mostly gatherings with family and friends.

I was deranged enough before the plague season came along but never seeing the happy laughing faces of all my sprots friends in particular, dragged my humour to a dark place.

 

During a chat over our first, post Sunday run, tea shop stop last week, our dear friend Birgit, said that starting the poetry group again would be helpful in lifting the heavy damp mist, laying over my heart and brain.

Of course, she is right.

In fact, she sometimes wears a Tee shirt that states; “I am not arguing, I am simply pointing out why I am right!”

                                         Arundel castle beyond the wheatfield
 

 So that said, I set about writing to the group of Scribblers to see how they felt about making a hopeful date to meet?

I had given it a lot thought and suggested the first Sunday of the month as regularly as possible. 

Sunday July 4^th was put forward to see how it sounded for a start?

I promised that we would make an effort to tidy up our home a bit before then, since with nobody calling in by order of HM Government, I admitted to having become domestically idle and clouds a dust has been fluttering into fluffy piles in every corner. My apologies for being so poetically and socially hopeless during this time were included in the message and I did feel that I had made a move in right direction.

I begged for forgiveness for my all-round lethargy and promised that there would be cake.

Now it seems very likely that our promised date to see big changes will yet again be postponed due to the rising covid figures. I have my fingers crossed that tomorrow’s Covid statement will not move the so-called freedom date too far forward since the July 4^th reunion meeting is only three weeks off.

My gut feeling is that we will have to put that happy get together on hold until August 1^st. In my email to my friends I had mentioned that I would read something from a new book written by somebody I follow on Instagram. The book is; Loosely Tethered Venom by Luke Emsley, whose posts I enjoy on Instagram under his l_3_m_s_l_3_y signature.

I am a very traditional poet myself… I blame the parents as always, but also the marvellous Mrs Thomas who taught poetry at my senior school and also Miss Wiggins at the Little Theatre in Worthing all my childhood. I was in The Speech Choir at school. Both teachers sent us for exams and in for festivals. My mum was an usherette at the Connaught Theatre and I saw everything performed by Worthing Rep at least once. 

 Where I am getting to with this is that I think I need a bit more l_3_m_s_l_3_y and much more James Marchiori and his books, To my beloved Heart and The Black Bloom, he is a huge favourite of mine and I have read his work regularly. I feel I need to be dug out of my secret room full of sonnets and my deep love of fanciful but careful rhyme now and again.

So for now I will stick to my self-imposed rigged timetable of must does: I have been trying to learn some Italian with the help of Duo-Lingo on my phone. At least an hour, every single day is spent on that, sometimes more, sometimes much more and when Steve is not home for the day, very much more.

This is made more of a discipline with the fact that I write everything down carefully in a bit pile of A4 notebooks, with the thought that I will have the entire course in hand written book form whenever I want it, rather than just trying to learn a few phrases a day. I have really enjoyed that, although sometimes my eyes start to go round in circles. We still have a race in Italy on the horizon at the end of September and I hope to, at least be able to understand much more than the basic tourist greetings and needs.

I also have two needlework projects on the go and I MUST add at least two threads per day, this takes far less time than the Duolingo and is generally done in early evening.

Thirty minutes gardening just about keeps us tidy and is short enough to avoid backache.

I am sure there is no need to tell the people who know me well that I have daily triathlon training to make sure of, though that is not so hard to fit in since most of that is done early morning with Stephen. In this fine weather we have also fitted in a few sea swims as well as The Wave pool in Littlehampton,

I keep up with emails pretty briskly too, both mine and Steve’s.

Phew!