By: Blonde Two
Don’t panic, I know that the title above looks as though the Blondes have been doing maths but we know our limits and, in fact, this blog post is about how maths doesn’t really work.
I bet you thought I was talking about age when you read it first. I could pretend here that I don’t know about being either thirty or forty but who would want to when both have been so good. I must be a very lucky girl because each decade just keeps on being better than the last.
I could, of course, have been talking about walking (surely not Blonde Two). I am not sure that I have ever walked thirty miles let alone forty in one go. I really must do a long distance walk sometime. I know though, because our Ten Tors youngsters have told me, that 45 Miles is much, much more than 35 Miles but that the jumpy to 55 Miles doesn’t seem to be as quite as big. Complicated, but you can see that the maths is already starting to not work (leave any numbers in our hands for long and they will deteriorate – it is because entropy increases when Blondes are around).
What I was actually pondering in this blog title was my swim this morning. I would like to tell you that it was somewhere wild and Dartmoory but nothing as adventurous as that I am afraid (although there did seem to be rather more plasters, toe nails and floating bits of hair in the pool than usual). Anyway, my swim is usually thirty lengths long. It only takes me twenty minutes these days, partly because the doc advised me against breast stroking (I think he was talking about swimming) with my dodgy knees and I have to do continuous front crawl (faster but tough on the arms). This morning’s swim was forty lengths long – obviously there was a Blonde reason for this. I wanted to see what it felt like to swim a kilometre. I had read about two Dartmoor Rescue chaps who are planning to swim sixteen kilometres in the sea today to raise a bit of money – you can read about their challenge and even join in with a sneaky donation here http://bit.ly/1oROPCp
And here we get down to the reason for all of this Blonde blather … I discovered that forty lengths is a disproportionate amount more than thirty lengths. I could do thirty in my sleep but that last ten, boy did they test me. I am not sure I could manage sixteen kilometres in pool, sea or puddle but, being Blonde, and having got the idea into my head, I am not satisfied with my single kilometre and want to go for a whole mile next!
Back in my mega youthful days of being mega fit and with no worries or responsibilities other than getting myself to work on time, I used to swim 100 lengths a day!!! Many people used to wonder how I could just swim up and down so many times without getting bored! I found changing stroke every 10 lengths helped-I’d alternate between front crawl and backstroke, both good for the arms and legs without that lateral stress on the knees. The last 10 or 20 I sometimes alternated stroke every 2 or 5. That sometimes made the last few a little more manageable!!! X
I never get bored swimming, all that counting to do and it is a great way to let the day’s events slip through your mind – I try to drown some of them!!
I used to swim a mile, twice a week. I’m surprised when you talk about crawl being tough on your arms. The key issue with crawl (which is what I used to swim) is breathing. Get it right and you can keep your head submerged for most of the arm cycle – breathing out underwater and breathing in via a brief head twist. This reduces drag, makes for better hydrodynamics and reduces all-over body strain. I wasn’t very quick (a mile took me 52 minutes) but once I’d perfected the breathing – not easy I can tell you – I had the impression I could have swum further in circumstance other than lengths up and down a pool. On holidays on the Greek island of Karpathos I used to swim from the port of Diafani down the coast to Vananda Beach, about a mile. After a ten minute rest I’d then swim back. Goggles were of course essential.
Wow! All you energetic mermaids! I used to be able to do a mile – long, long ago; now, I hope I could swim ashore if I fell out of a canoe; since I only canoe on canals, that might be about 2 metres – –
P.S. Sorry, and mermen!
That is brilliant, imagine a 2 metre swimming safety test! If you were tall enough, you wouldn’t have to swim at all.
Ah well – poor old K9, who cannot swim at all, fell into the Staffs and Worcester just where it was 7 feet deep behind a lock; even I can’t stretch that far!