Good times

An excellent session in the swimming pool last night. Properly excellent, not just 'felt good' or 'tried hard'. Fewer people than usual in the fast lane, which opened up the opportunity of putting in the longer sets. Ian, our swim coach, duly obliged. After a 500m warm up (done in 7:01), we did 8 x 50m drills, before a main set of 8 x 250m on 4:00 intervals. I led out, and felt damn good doing it. My slowest time was 3:28, and my fastest (my first and last) was 3:21. I felt totally comfortable, and could have shortened the intervals if I had to. My stroke per length rate rarely went above 18, meaning my stroke was pretty efficient. Better still, Ian told me I had an excellent smooth stroke, with a great high elbows, as well as giving me a few pointers on how to improve. Pointers which I'll use to go faster and faster. All in all a great CV workout - it was good to be used as an example by Ian when he was showing other lanes how to properly do a swim stroke - proof I'm doing something right at least! Plenty of stuff to improve upon though - by top class swimmers standards, I'm still very poor! Quite how poor? Well, the current worl record for 400m is 3:40, held by Paul Biedermann of Germany. My best effort? 5:28.

Have been recruiting for the Welsh 3000s again. I have Dan and Huw onboard, and will broach the subject with John in the coming weeks. I don't like having tried and faied to do the challenge - it hangs over me like a spectre. Plenty of things went wrong on our last attempt. There wasn't much daylight, and we squandered a lot of it by starting up from Pen Y Pass after daybreak. Navigationally we were OK, but it became very difficult and eventually untenable in thick mist and total darkness on the rocky summits of Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach. Some of the group probably lacked a little in mountain fitness. This time we're going to deal with all of those problems. We'll camp on Snowdon the night before, unpack the tents in the dark and hit summit number 1, Snowdon, at the stroke of dawn (or maybe even just before). I'll have scouted the route on the Glyders and the first part of the Carneddau beforehand on a couple of spare weekends, and we'll be doing Fawer and Fach in daylight, so the boulder fields will be less of a problem. I'll also be making sure the entire team is fit enough - I'll be checking up on peoples progress and chivvying them along. We will succeed.