More swimming, at a quarter of world-record pace.

[fivemack]

Jesus Green is surprisingly nice at this time of year; not energy-sappingly chilly, and it's pleasant to discover that I can in fact swim a hundred yards at a time without stopping. Twelve lengths, so a bit over a kilometre; four each breast-stroke, back-stroke and crawl. Fast crawl took me just over three minutes but left me heart-pounding and distinctly dizzy; the other strokes seemed to take about 4.5, though I think I always managed under five minutes — looking on wikipedia, this is almost exactly four times as slow as the world record holder, which is probably the best spin I can put on my unreasonable sluggishness. I was a bit surprised to find that I had trouble walking in a straight line as I got out of the pool at the end of the swim; chlorinated ears?

It's clear that I hang around at the ends of the pool for as long as I think I can get away with, so Jesus Green's having a quarter as many ends as Parkside is an advantage.

Sadly I managed to miss numberland; I'll try again next week.

The exercise has left me too tired to spend the evening sitting creatively in front of a hot iPhoto to prepare the full shiny photo-post that I promised taimatsu, but look what I saw at the weekend:

Comments

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Ah. It's like unexpectedly seeing an old friend. Did you see the little girl as well?

[We had hopes of being in Antwerp the weekend just gone, but it wasn't to be]

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Yes; I caught most of the Saturday spectacle, including the little girl disco-dancing suspended from a crane, and the end part of the Sunday when she was riding on the elephant's tusks.

I'd missed it completely in London and thought Antwerp was a reasonable weekend trip, which it isn't, quite - you have to leave work before four on the Friday to get to Antwerp by eleven, and to leave Antwerp at 7pm on the Sunday to get a Eurostar that gets you home at midnight, and it is unwise to do this if the next day requires significant achievement at work.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

I'd have expected it to be easier than that from Dahn Sarf, too (I did make it to Belgium and the Netherlands occasionally when I was working in London back at the turn of the century, but those trips did involve taking slightly longer weekends).

If our hopes had ever got to the planning stage, we'd have given up - we'd have had to have left Edinburgh before lunch on Friday, and we'd not have been home until some time late on Monday.

But it would almost have been worth it!