Achievement Unlocked

As you know, loyal readers, Monday night is swim night.  In the changing rooms are two men sharing a thorough discourse on the economic development of the BRIC countries.

Not really.  They're talking about stains on the ceiling.  Every other word is "fuck" in some form or other, at a volume a good few decibels louder than strictly necessary. The odd "shit" is thrown in just to add some colour. They would make a fascinating training corpus for a POS tagger.

"Fuckin' hell mate, have you fucking seen the fucking shit on the fucking ceiling, there's fuck loads of it"

"Fuck off!"

"I don't know what the fuck this fucking stuff is"

Leisure centres, I fear, are the natural habitat of the boor and the bozo.  I'm almost sure these guys are going to turn out to be doing triathlon.  I wait for the topic to arise.  Thankfully it never comes, but I'm always on my guard.

In the pool, I do a few lengths to warm up, and then challenge myself to do a full 750m non-stop, just to see if I can. After about 8 lengths, everything goes into auto-pilot.  I am a whirling, kicking automaton, barely cognizant of what I am doing.  My nostrils are pumping out bubbles with a strict rhythm.  My ears are plugged with water. My goggles are fogged once more, and all I can really see is the dark outline of the lane marker on the bottom of the pool keeping me in a straight line. Sensorily deprived, it's pretty boring.  My mind switches to the code that I left unfinished before I left.  By length 24 I'm mulling over the Viterbi algorithm.  Yes, that boring.

I'm still slow.  As I'm ploughing my watery furrow, a couple of bikini'd lovelies paddle gently up and down the pool alongside me, nattering as they go (maybe about the economic development of the BRIC countries, possibly about nail polish, I'm not sure).  Over the course of about 15 lengths I only gain about 10 yards on them.  But most importantly, I keep going, and I finish the 30 lengths with a minor cramp in my calf and a very sore right wrist, presumably not helped by poor technique.  Having neglected to look at a clock before I started, I have no idea how long it actually took.  Common sense says it was around 20 minutes, but it feels like an hour.

Achievement duly unlocked, I go home and raid the kids' sweet tin.