Monday 11 June 2012

Binge's Adventures Abroad Day 3 (including an encounter with the World Championship's Temporal Anomaly)


As predicted with 3 events today the world and his wife converged on the pool  and the place was simply stowed off.  There's a lot of outdoor space for swimmers to set up camp around the pool but by 3pm this afternoon trying to find a spare spot of grass to park yourself was rapidly becoming a bit of a challenge. The competition started at 7.30am with the warm up at 6.30, not surprisingly I dipped out of the opportunity to test out the outdoor pool at that time of the morning.

My roommate Meritorious Jen however didn't swim yesterday and was keen to try it out so she left the Villa at some infeasible time in the middle of the night. Returning to kick me out of bed for breakfast announcing that the pool had been chocker, chaotic and a complete waste of time. (leaving me feeling just a little smug).

Jen, myself and the Karate kids were all swimming the 100 breaststroke, so we calculated it would start at about 1.30 and planned to arrive at the pool by 1pm. Yet again we encountered the Temporal Distortion Field that surrounds these events. I've been to enough of these things to know that time marches to a completely different drum at a FINA event so it should have come as no surprise that they were running late. 

I eventually made it into the water at about 3.45pm and yet again was assigned Lane 1 (lane of death). Better swim than yesterday and improved about 9 places. The winner of my age group just went 1.15.50 I mean that is just uneffingbelievable.

Anyway as I write this it's 19.24pm and they are 28 heats through the men's 100 breaststroke, only another 102 to go! Honestly  you've got to be here to appreciate the scale of this thing, there were 224 heats of the men's 100 freestyle that's nearly 1300 swimmers. We've just driven past the pool on the way home and at 9.52 pm they were still going; that's a seriously long day. (did you spot the little bit of time travel here as I stopped blogging at 7.24 to go and find some food.) 

So after dinner in the company of Batman and Robyn who arrived on their supercharged hotel Batbikes, we set off to try and find our way home. Could Binge and The Karate Kids make it to the Villa avoiding the deadly dirt track? Fortunately you don't have to tune in next week at the same bat time on the same bat channel because I can announce that we've finally worked out how to get back to where we're staying avoiding that particular piece of unmetalled road. 

We discovered that the problem appears to be, where Tomtom wants to bring us off the main road, the junction is closed, but no one told poor Tom. Sumo solved this problem tonight with the most spectacular U turn across 4 lanes of traffic. A piece of driving that was truly worthy of an Italian! and confused the hell out of Tomtom.

I'm deciding at the moment whether to spend my day off watching the relays on Thursday or to simply chill in the extremely pleasant surroundings of our temporary home mmh that's a hard one particularly as I know that by Thursday I'll have had 4 full on days of this madness and World Championship Fatigue Syndrome will be creeping in.

Today's yardage
Warm up
600 swim
2 x 50's 12.5 metres hard 12.5 metres easy
100 Breast 1.29.58
800 swim down
1600 metres

No comments:

Post a Comment