I have a photo of my first use of new wetsuit (yes my bum certainly does look big in it!) which I’ll upload so here’s the first entry of the musings of a modern pentathlete to go with it.
If I’m honest I was sort of hoping to get Modern Pentathlon in the ‘random allocation’ of our team’s sports because, let’s face it, you just have to be a little bit better than mediocre in five sports and you could make the Olympic team because anyone who’s any good at any of the sports wouldn’t bother with the other four. And of course if I manage to complete the 5 sports I get a bonus 20 points for completing a 6th sport without having to do anything extra! So how is my attempt for Olympic mediocrity going, sport by sport?
Athletics (distance) – going well, I’ve opted for a 10k run as I’ve calculated that this is the distance that will get me most bonus points for the time taken. So far have done a couple of (very hilly) training runs about that distance, actually about 9.2k but I only gave up because I got bored!
Swimming – the pool option seemed a bit easy so I’ve opted for open water swimming which means a 5k or 10k swim. I made a fantastic start to my training programme by managing to buy online a bargain ex-hire swimming wetsuit which despite taking about half an hour to get on actually fitted, however I then failed miserably to submit an entry form for my first real open water swim, 1 mile sea swim at Teignmouth. But I thought I must start somewhere so went to Broadsands instead to test out the new wetsuit – at least getting dressed is improving, already down to 15 minutes! The wetsuit worked, it was very warm and incredibly buoyant, in fact so much so that a very peculiar (especially for me) lightness-of-bottom made it quite difficult to swim breast stroke. My goggle elastic was suffering from being quite old and saggy (sounds familiar) so they leaked a lot making it also quite difficult to swim front crawl, but with an occasional unconventional combination of crawl legs and breast stroke arms I managed to get to the 5 knot marker, accompanied by Pete, Jasmine and Aaron in the back-up kayak to reassuringly “stop mummy from drowning”. The fact that they hadn’t paddled at all to get to the marker should have been a warning sign that getting back wasn’t going to be much fun and indeed with the wind, tide and waves right in my face it wasn’t! But I made it and on reaching the beach was keen to know how far I’d managed to go so approached the very knowledgeable-looking Torbay Beach Team to ask how far out the 5 knot marker is. “Why are you going to swim to it?” they asked. Now I’m sure a faster thinker than me could have witheringly pointed out that I was already dripping wet, shivering, goggles still on my head and clutching a cup of tea as though my life depended on it, but my witty rejoiner? - “I just did”. Anyway after some thought and accumulation of their collective knowledge of wind, tide etc they estimated I had swum ¾ of a mile ….on further questioning by Pete later it emerged that it was actually based on the fact that it looked like a Par 5! But I’m sticking with ¾ mile which doesn’t seem bad for a first go….although I think 5k will be quite enough for the real thing. Next time – a 1 mile sea swim at Broadsands in aid of Devon Air Ambulance on the 18th Sept (entry form already in the post this time!).
Shooting – I won a water pistol fight against 4 under-7s last week, does that count?
Equestrian – investigating how many Piriteze it takes to overdose
Fencing – umm.
Amy
photos on the next post
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