no shade
last august, at a training camp in calella, i swam 4,500 metres before breakfast. two hours and two minutes. my watch recorded the effort as moderate. i went back at half three and swam another 4,450.
on 12 september i am swimming 5,000 metres of the london royal docks, and i am not at all sure i can do it.
those two paragraphs look like they contradict each other. they do not. the reason is the wall.
what a wall is for
a pool gives you a wall every twenty five metres, or every fifty if you are lucky. most swimmers think of it as the thing that ends the length. it is doing more than that.
a wall gives you three things.
it gives you rest you do not count. a push-off is a second and a half of gliding where you are not swimming and not resting, and nobody records it as either. over five kilometres in a twenty five metre pool that is two hundred push-offs. five minutes of not swimming, distributed so evenly that you never notice it happening.
it gives you a reset of your line. you cannot go crooked in a pool. the lane rope will not let you, the black line tells you where you are, and every wall squares you up again whether you deserved it or not. a swimmer with a wandering stroke and a swimmer with a true one arrive at the same wall.
and it gives you breath on your terms. you know exactly when the turn is coming. you can hold on for the last five metres because you can see the end of them. the wall is a promise, and it keeps it every length.
take all three away and you have open water.
what i am actually short of
so the gap is not fitness. i have done ninety percent of this distance in one go, at an effort my own watch called moderate, and i am fitter now than i was then.
the gap is continuity. it is two and a half hours of unbroken rhythm with no push-offs to hide in, no black line, and nothing to square me up when i drift. it is sighting, which is a skill i do not have. it is a wetsuit decision i have not made. it is feeding on the move, which i have never done. it is water that moves, in a dock, in september, next to a live runway.
the list, written down now so it can be checked later.
- i do not know how often to sight, or what it costs my stroke.
- i do not know whether to wear a wetsuit. it is optional at my age and i have never raced in one.
- i do not know how to feed on the move, or whether i need to over 5km.
- i do not know what a rolling start does to pacing when i am used to a beep and a block.
- i do not know how cold a september dock is at the ninety minute mark, which is different from how cold it is at the start.
- i do not know how far off line i drift when nothing corrects me.
- i do not know what my stroke does after two hours without a single push-off.
- i do not know what four hours of cut-off time feels like to someone whose races last twenty six seconds.
i will answer all eight of these in public before race day. some of the answers will be embarrassing.
calella
on friday i fly to spain for four days and six sessions. the pool is fifty metres, outdoors, twenty seven degrees, and the briefing note says there is almost no shade, so you will probably be in the sun all the time you are swimming.
fifty metre walls are the closest a pool gets to open water. half as many push-offs, half as many resets, twice as long in one unbroken rhythm before anything squares you up. it is not the dock. it is the nearest thing to the dock that has a lifeguard.
why the deep end
i teach children to swim. the whole idea behind devaqua is float first: trust the water, then breathe, then kick, then everything that sits on top of that. in the right order, slowly, with nobody frightened.
going and swimming five kilometres of a cold dock is the exact opposite of that, on purpose. this is the deep end, on video, so no child has to start there.
i am fundraising for level water, who teach disabled children to swim one to one at their own pace. 10p a metre. https://www.justgiving.com/page/five-thousand-metres