Progress

Progress has been made on a number of fronts this week, firstly and perhaps most importantly I have received confirmation email from Julie Bradshaw MBE, (CSA Ltd secretary) confirming receipt and process of my swim registration. That more or less completes the administration side of things, all that remains is the reservation of accommodation for the tidal dates and training weekends in Dover, the Lakes and Cork. I have emailed a couple of recommended hotels in Dover but am yet to receive a reply.

Secondly I am delighted to say the facility to donate online to J.A.C.K. is now live, I have distributed a number of sponsor forms at work and at the pool, there are a lot of pledges, Thank-you all. I would however much prefer where possible for people to make use of the Justgiving widget thus enabling the J.A.C.K foundation to benefit from the 28% it can reclaim through gift aid, the monetary advantages speak for themselves.

Training wise it has been a reasonable week, I am already over the 20 thousand metres, have had a dip outside at 6 degrees as per the previous post and had a 10km time trial, I wanted to swim the ten kilometres on a specific time, I managed to keep every 1000m within 15 seconds of each other with times of 15:45 to 16 mins. I took 15 seconds rest between each km to feed and flip over the counter. A great improvement on this time last year when I had never swam more than 4km in a session, I felt good afterwards with no shoulder pain.

The most stressful area at the moment is weight gain. It is difficult for me, when training most days burning calories in the warm pool to take in sufficient food to compensate, as well make gains. I am using supplements but don't expect great weight gains until such times as the swims are restricted to long weekend swims only? Any advice on this issue would be appreciated!

Had a little check of the calendar today too, its just 25 weeks til the start of my tides, and about 14 weeks until Cork... to make it worse below is a photograph of the swim start at Kinsale, Cork, do you think Ned is trying to frighten me!?