Binge's Adventures in Eindhoven Day 3 (Sandbagger Binge?)

Monday 2nd September: Okay you've noticed I'm playing a bit of catch up here with the blogging as after yesterday's exertions in the warm up pool we returned to the twilight zone and spent the rest of the afternoon in the leisure pool (which brings to mind the phrase "Busman's holiday")

The water slides and white water ride were great fun, although I discovered the Dutch aren't big on health and safety as I suffered a rather nasty scrape to my ankle when it came into contact with a strategically placed concrete block inside a shipwreck as I dived down to look at the sharks. (oh for goodness sake grow up I hear you say)

So day 2 of the meet and the competition opens for me with a 400 free. I had carried out the half hearted theme even into my entries so rather than do the usual 5 pool swims I chose to enter only 2. I was surprisingly mindful when filling in the entry form that my usual events the 100 and 200 breaststroke can be exquisitely painful at the best of times and excruciatingly painful when unfit.

I had also made a minor miscalculation in my entry time. I figured that my Plymouth swim was awful and with no further preparation I adopted a very scientific approach by simply adding 4 seconds onto it (that's a second for every 100 if you hadn't guessed) Sadly I didn't check what time I had swum at Plymouth and wrongly assumed it had been a 6:36 so I entered a 6:40 (it was actually a 6:16). I found myself in an early heat keeping 70 year old sprint specialist Jean Howard Jones company oops.

I was sitting in the cafe area enjoying the sunshine and the craic when I realised that heat 5 were in the water, (I was in heat 8) a bit of an adrenalin rush and a dash to the loos where I (amongst other things) struggled to drag on the suit. Made it into marshalling with time to spare, just as we were released onto the pool side.

I was in lane 0 at the far end of the pool and I sauntered across to my lane to discover there was somebody else in it! In my blind panic I hadn't noticed the cleverly hidden penultimate line of marshalling chairs just to the right of the pool side entrance. After all of that my swim definitely  exceeded expectations. Not quite sure where it came from and it's still a rubbish time but whilst it's sadly not, as the announcer said "a new personal record by 38 seconds" it is a 14 second improvement over Plymouth and I'll take that. I celebrated with a 200 metre swim down!