Today I am going swimming.
I bloody hate swimming!
I feel like I ought to like it but I have just never been able to get into it. I get in the pool and Do Lengths. Up and down, up and down. No music. Getting a bit cold. I don’t really feel like I am expending any energy, but at the same time I can’t actually go any faster. I have chlorine up my nose. The other people in the pool start doing my head in. Why is Michael Phelps doing laps in the slow lane? Does he really need to splash so much? Why are those people just sitting in the pool chatting and getting in my way? Why don’t they go to the pub? At least it’s adults only… no, wait, there are some twenty-year-old men behaving like children. But bigger. I bloody hate swimming. I must have been here for hours. I get out. My watch tells me I’ve been in the pool fifteen minutes. I go in the sauna. Really hate swimming.
I also hate swimming because it is what you have to do when you are injured. That or the only marginally more entertaining cross trainer. I spent a lot of the summer of 2016 (my summer of woe) at the London Aquatics Centre in the Olympic Park. This is at least a bit more glamorous and exciting, and twice the size of a normal pool, so other people became a bit less irritating. Once I saw Tom Daley there practising his diving! But now there is a new swimming pool within walking distance of my house which is included in my gym membership, so I can’t really justify the expense or bother of going to Stratford. At least I can go to the sauna afterwards.
The news on my leg is good. On Tuesday I could walk okay, so long as I didn’t bend my leg too much. On Wednesday I could walk perfectly normally, and could only feel something wrong if I bent my leg at a very specific angle and put pressure on. Today I can’t feel anything wrong with it at all. I feel like I could probably manage a short run, but that it would not be a good idea to do so. I think I am going to just have to keep resting until Sunday and hope for the best. If it hurts during the Brighton Half, I’ll just have to record my first DNF. I was hoping to get a better time than at Barcelona but that’s gone out of the window now. I just have to count it as part of my marathon training. It’s a bit annoying as this is probably my last ever half marathon and I wanted to go out with a bang rather than a fizzle. But it is better than not being able to run at all.
7:07 