One of my secret – well not-so-secret now I’m confessing it here — addictions is sci-fi and fantasy fiction. And among the best of the fantasy series I’ve discovered recently has been Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London, about a detective, Peter Grant, who solves magical crimes in a world where the river deities manifest as real people.
My life, from baptism onwards, has been spent immersed in the world of religion. I’m not certain really where I stand, or swim, on all that. I was a great runner and swimmer at school but our family spent so much time in church that more time was spent on my knees than in the sea. But if where I am right now means swimming at dusk on the Thames at Teddington, then something’s definitely going right with the flow, whatever the fact or fantasy of what I hope to achieve.
Swimming up and down the Thames at twilight, trying to build a relationship with the water, to understand it better, to be more at-one with the environment so I am racing with it, not against it, it is easy to believe there is some spirit in that water, some ghostly, misty presence, dancing like the dolphins on the wavelets and in the light, bridging that gap between fantasy and reality.
As children, we swam often in the stormy seas off the Anglesey and North Wales coast. We were taken water-skiing and plunged repeatedly into the icy waters of the lake at Combemere in Cheshire and on the Menai Strait. I have known from early childhood how to handle deep, cold water, how to body-surf on and dive through tumbling waves, how to survive all but the worst currents. But I get horribly seasick so avoid boats and, in all the years of adulthood since then, feet planted firmly on dry land, I had completely forgotten it all. It is time to relearn it.
An extraordinary thing about this strange athletic journey I have embarked on at my unlikely time of life, is the way people and opportunities just seem to appear, as if my magic, exactly when I need them most. One catalyst in this adventure has been our well-known local Liberal Democrat, Serge Lourie, former leader of Richmond Council.
Soon after leaving hospital, and as lockdown was ending, I bumped into Serge and his friend Philip one day at Torelli’s, the local cafe (best coffee in the world, since you ask) that sponsors my local bike club, KCR, short for Kew Coffee Run. I had just signed up for Cafod’s Walk Against Hunger Lent campaign, and this entailed going on Strava for the first time. Serge and Phil persuaded me to step up from walking to running by doing parkrun, and enrolled me into their early morning breakfast running group. Now he had started another group, a Couch to 5k. And one of the recruits, Marlene Laurence, has turned out to be the founder of the Teddington Bluetits. (Marlene is also helping lead the campaign to stop the water extraction plan at Teddington – sign the petition here.)
Marlene is charmingly persuasive and so I signed up to the Bluetits. I also signed the petition. And last Friday, bereft of my open water comfort blanket, aka a wetsuit, I did my first swim in the Thames, hoping it will help make me better prepared mentally for the tributary tribulations of open water swims in race conditions,
And what a joy it was. Once again, at dusk, the transcendent light showing the way, the water was fresh and clear. It was cold but thrillingly so. As the sun disappeared behind the skyline of the trees that line the Thames at Teddington, a lone, snowy-white swan swam beside us, mourning the loss of its late partner. A fresh breeze shifted softly, raising mists from the surface. We swam a kilometre. Once again, it was all too easy to lose my way, not a good idea when this can lead the swimmer too easily into the middle of the river, where large pleasure boats go up and down regularly to and from Teddington Lock. At my tri club, Fun-on Tri, we have been practising sighting. Neither at Eastbourne nor Sunderland did I really master this skill, going wildly off course at both events. But on the river, somehow, I managed it for the first time.
So with my last triathlon of the season approaching, the standard distance at St Neots, I have been reflecting a little on the Sunderland triathlon, where the problems with the swim have been well documented. I suffered no adverse reactions, but the severity of swim itself was testament to my lack of mental preparation for those conditions.
And overall, I loved the event. I remembered that I was racing, unlike my previous effort at Eastbourne where the water was so lovely, the landscape for the bike so beautiful and the company of others so entertaining, the run so hot and glorious, I kept forgetting I was even in a race at all.
Nevertheless, despite finishing 390th in Eastbourne in an inauspicious time of around 3:28:07, I did somehow manage to qualify for next year’s European championships and am now the proud owner of my first pieces of British Triathlon TeamGB age-group kit, which I confess I wear everywhere I can. Yes, I’m in the team! I never dreamed when starting out on this after lockdown, that such amazing opportunities could exist for an, until recently, seriously unfit women in her 60s – the opportunity to represent Britain in a notoriously challenging athletic sport.
It was being buoyed up by Eastbourne that I decided to try to qualify for the world championships also, in Malaga next year, because, well, why not? So I entered Sunderland, which as well as being a worlds qualifier was the British tri championship. So everyone turned out. And those older age-group women are pretty amazing.
Rather like St Neots will be in a couple of weeks, the first challenge was managing to get up there at all from Kew, given the difficulties on public transport at the moment. As we don’t own a car, any journey is by train and bike. Carrying all the gear associated with triathlon, bike shoes as well as running shoes, spare inner tubes, pump, wet-suit, butt-cream, plasters, aspirins – the list is long and all together, the load is heavy.
Sunderland was beautiful, sunny, clean, with a lovely fresh breeze.
Lulled into complacency by this, in the wake of the warm, cozy coastal waters of Eastbourne, I was not at all prepared for the Sunday morning swim in the North Sea at Roker Beach. People had tried to warn me. I have friends who grew up in Sunderland. Some had tried to dissuade me from even going.
The water tasted unpleasant and it looked filthy. It was choppy, increasingly so as we moved further from the shore, and with almost every wave that broke over me I swallowed a mouthful. I tried not to think of what was settling in the bottom of my tummy, failed repeatedly to orient myself. It was so cold – 13 degrees – I couldn’t even put my head in at first to swim properly, so struggled along with a ridiculous doggy paddle. The famous Roker dolphins had been out, dancing around and doubtless laughing at us and maybe especially me as I added a few extra zigzags onto the already-zigzaggy course, lengthening my slow time even further.
I finally emerged from the 1500m swim and tried to get some feeling back into my icy limbs on the run to transition, which felt like my worst transition ever. My hands were so cold, like frozen blocks, I couldn’t get my wetsuit off, couldn’t put my race belt on, couldn’t buckle up my helmet.
But I didn’t get sick and strangely, despite everything, still loved the experience. Whatever the time of day, or the weather conditions, there is something extraordinary about the light on the open water when you are out there immersed in it, eyes level with the surface. For me, it feels like being bathed in a healing light, infused with a breathtakingly transcendent immanence. No wonder those dolphins laugh and play.
The 35k bike was a lot of fun, what is known as a ‘technical course’ with lots of tricky turns and sprints, mainly flat. And on the 10k run, once again, it became an opportunity to chat and laugh with other age-groupers as we looped around.
What was truly astonishing to me at the end, was I took 19 minutes off my Eastbourne time, coming in at 3:09:24. But it was still not fast enough.
Looking back now as we near the end of the season, I compare this to my first event in April, Dorney Lake duathlon, where I tore several muscles struggling to finish in 3:27 after overtraining. At Crystal Palace sprint tri, still in considerable pain from this injury, I hobbled round the 5k run after the swim and bike, finishing near the back in 1:35. There is a definite upwards trajectory although even now, my torn muscle tears can still feel a bit sore if I overdo it. Because of the injuries, and my failure to understand the nature of some of the challenges such as the cold, choppy sea at Sunderland, I feel I haven’t achieved what I could have in swim-bike-run in this first season. As countless tall, rangy gazelle-like sexanegarian and septuagenarian women sprint past me on the runs in these triathlons, I am forced to reflect though that they too have faced and come through these same challenges in the water and on the bike. ‘S&C. Three times a week,’ one elegant 60-something worlds qualifier helpfully advised as she stood, strong and tall, while I struggled to stay upright. So I have indeed started weight-training.
I was definitely sunk by the swim at Sunderland. It was, I suppose, one of those ‘stepping stones to growth’ and I guess this stepping stone did help me across the water at Roker in the end. This is all proving much harder than I ever thought it would. And aspects of it, such as open water swimming, are also much more enjoyable than I would ever have believed they could be.
‘When I was debanked by Coutts.’
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