Just under a week to go to the big day The original Group and Steve at their 100x 100m swim at Charlton Lido. It has come around really quickly since Mark Invited a select group of swimmers from around the country to Honour Steve in this momentous event. Amoung the swimmers are some pretty heavy hitters int the Open water Ultra marathon world and then there is me. I am…
A lost week Ahem!! Have not ventured into the water for the last week. No real excuse, laziness just got the better of me. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself to get into the pool on the way past the gym, my car – and laziness – just seemed to get the better of me. Even yesterday I tried to convince myself that I needed to go…
Winter is coming fast The days are getting shorter, the nights are now pretty long, and training is carrying on but plodding up and down a 25m chlorine pit that is heated to 26 degrees can become a bit mind – numbing (in the boring sense of the word). Cruising up and down an outdoor heated pool in the dark can be a little more entertaining , where mist rising…
Roll on 2017. It seems odd that I find myself counting down the days of this year. I usually chastise people for wishing their life away and for the spontaneous among us – I think I am the King in this respect – it really unseats me having to think about what I will be doing next year , let alone NEXT BLOODY WEEK. My absence from various pools, lakes…
My Channelversary I was just thinking that I have not blogged for a while. It seems only fitting that Today I put a small blog together. This time 8 years ago, I was back at work,recovering from having just become the most recent Channel Swimmer, most of my colleagues were stupefied that I had actually made it into the office. I was the last successful swim of 2008. It was…
Final Race tear apart. Before I start writing this, just warning you that this could be quite a lengthy one – a lot happened – I am trying to document it to make sense of it myself and in the hope that some may learn something. My swim was not very pretty and although it was 27km – a distance that I should be able to handle with ease –…
Seven days to go!! Firstly, thank you for taking the time to read this. This Blog serves two purposes, to Keep you abreast of what is happening in the Hippo world and this month, the wider world. A lot has happened in the last couple of weeks. I find myself in a bit of an Ironic situation. I have lived in two countries in my life and the last two…
Crochet Chronicles A fun story about the birth of a costume This is a story about the new Must Have costume in the open water swimming world… What started off as a bit of a joke about 16 months ago has now turned into a fully fledged Costume contagion. So what is it all about and how did it come about and where are we going in the future? I…
Standup/Lie down Paddle boarding. I know I spend a lot of time IN the water, but recently, an opportunity arose which could not be missed. Some ladies from one of the groups I regularly swim with also swims at a lake not to far from where we do our river swims. This lake is more of a water sports lake than just a swimming lake and they have various things…
Jubilee Swim Build Up It has come and gone and I am still in one piece??? The run up to this event was a bit of a damp squib with me losing my swim mojo about three weeks before it so I did virtually no training in the three weeks apart from heading to the pool with the slimhippo to give her some coaching and flail my arms a little…