Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Doubling Up...

It was a really great weekend's swimming. The Spike Island swim was happening Sunday. So on Saturday I took it easy, a nice short pool session to stretch out after all the week's metres.

Sunday arrived bright and sunny to my delight :) We met in Cobh town and changed and got ourselves ready to go. I'm sure that people passing us were thinking that we were totally mad...but what's new?! We got into the water around 11:30, high tide was around 1pm so we were hoping to get a push from the tide at the end.

The temperature felt great, around 11deg C, about a degree warmer than Sandycove (which seems to be the coldest of the local swimming spots at the moment!!!). We had our instructions as to where to get our bearings from so off we went, Danny and David with a rib and myself and Imelda with the boat. It seemed like no time had passed by the time we reached the island, although it took us about half an hour. From that I was figuring that we should be done in just over an hour and a half. 

As we swam along the back of the island the water temperature dropped considerably and I started getting cold. Then we turned the corner to head back towards Cobh and it got very choppy. At this stage I was counting down the minutes-I was still cold and that was making me tired and the choppy water was annoying me. I figured that we had about a half an hour left at the most. Boy was I wrong! 

We were taking our bearings off the Cathedral spire, and for ages it didn't seem to be getting any closer. What was actually happening was that the tide had turned so we were fighting the river and the tide, so we were getting closer but at a very slow pace. We realised this when we had to stop to let a ship pass. While we were stopped we felt ourselves drifting like crazy away from the town. So for the rest of the swim we were swimming back upriver towards our starting point. It felt like we were going in slow motion or something, we were passing the buildings SO slowly. And all this time I was miserable-I had never heated up after the temperature drop earlier and I just wanted to be out of there. But there was no way that I was getting on that boat!!

In the end it took us 2hours and 35minutes to complete the swim. Over double the length of my longest sea swim up until then! I didn't appreciate it at the time, but now it feels great to know that I can do that long in 11deg C. And I wasn't even that cold after-I shivered a bit but warmed up fast. I've been a lot worse! It was a really successful swim and I'm really happy now that we had to fight hard to complete it, no point in making training easy! 

Monday was a bank holiday, so I decided to go down to Sandycove...the plan was to do three laps and I had company for all of them so all was good. What I didn't factor in was a very cold wind and how tired I was from the day before. After the first lap I was cold and decided that two was enough. No point in torturing myself on my day off! As it turned out noone ended up going around again anyway. Although I'd been hoping for more, I was very happy with what I'd done, especially after the day before. A good weekend's swimming all round :)

So now we're into the next week and I have a bit of an easy week...yesterday was the first day in ages that I didn't feel stiff at all after the three low mileage days in a row, it felt really strange! And today I had one horrible session and came back later after college and did a great one, funny how that goes. Lets hope the rest of the week goes well.

On the fundraising side of things, I got some more sponsorship this week from my fantastic Connecticut cousins, thanks guys :) It's great to see the money coming in. Jack and Jill have also put a profile of me on their website which is cool, it's great to see them getting involved and publicising the swim. Don't forget, if you want to sponsor me, you can do it here. Thanks!

1 comment:

M said...

doing a great job Lisa
hope all is well
you are now in my fone as Lisa2way
keep up the good work
Mark n Kelly x