Sink or Swim

I stay up late looking through triathlon blogs, finding the people who have done what I'm doing.  Among others, I find this one.  I read the latest post with dismay, and my thoughts turn to Scott [1]. I'm reminded that I'm terribly lucky to be even in a position to do a triathlon.  I'm fortunate to be healthy enough; fortunate to be able to part with 50 quid for the pleasure; fortunate simply to have life so easy that the biggest problem in my life is how to cover 16 miles under my own steam.  Not for food or water or shelter or medicine, but simply for fun.

Friday morning I have to myself, and I elect to swim.  The swim is the bit I somewhat dread.  I'm a competent, but far from confident, swimmer, and decidedly un-aerodynamic in the water.  I treat myself to a pair of classy mirrored goggles at the pool, and consider a swim cap, but decide that nature has taken care of that for me already.

I survey the pool - it's a "proper swimming" session, so the pool is split into slow, medium and fast lanes, plus an open section.  I get into the open section, and notice that it's all ladies. It is, I'm sure, coincidental, but I can't hazard the small but not impossible chance that I'm breaking some unspoken rule whereupon gentlemen are not welcome, so head for the lanes. I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to want the fast lane.  I look at the slow lane, which is full of gently gliding grannies, so choose the medium lane.

I figure that I'm not the best swimmer, but bashing out 750m in a pool can't be that much trouble.  It's 30 lengths of the pool, so I'll just get cracking and see how we go.  One length of front crawl later, and I reach for the wall, spluttering and breathing hard.  This has not worked out quite how I thought it would.  I breaststroke back to the other end to consider my plans.  I unscientifically conclude that my breathing is all wrong - I'm holding my breath underwater, and I'm taking a breath only every 4 strokes - and I'm simply going too fast.  Try as I might however, I can't slow down, although it's notable that my "fast" is a good deal slower than the "slow" of most of the others around me.  The urge to breathe keeps propelling me forward.

By the end of the session, I'm still struggling to do more than 2 lengths of front crawl without needing a break, or even to feel comfortable doing front crawl. Water has entered every facial cavity.  I wonder how I'm going to do this in the middle of a pack of flailing arms and legs in open water that will be at best 12 degrees colder than this pool.

[1] whose immaculate talent for writing prose, by the way, was a significant inspiration for writing this stuff down to try and hone my own skills