Road Trip Day 7 Wednesday 6th August - Ou eh le papier and Gobbie Dobbie's Doggy Bloggy

Now if the most photographed thing at the Parc Jean Drapeau is the Fat Rat, Ground Hog, Goafer thingy that featured here then the second most photographed thing must be Gobby.

I briefly mentioned his presence yesterday without realising his importance in the whole World Masters infrastructure.

But I will mock no longer because he is a service dog and he helps out his mistress (who has interesting taste in crocs) and who we would probably call a St John's Ambulance person... allegedly he can dial 911 on a cell phone and bring her nappy pins!

What I really want to know is does he know the lock code or can the sensor read his paw print?

In the meantime back to the nitty gritty of swimming it was 50 breaststroke day, and the splash and dash was in the temporary pool. Before wandering across there I nipped into the ladies at the main pool, and as I was walking into the stall the lady vacating it came out shaking her head and muttering about "none papiere"

Oh oh, fortunately World Masters Survival skills came into play here, as in rule1 always keep an emergency supply of bog roll tucked into your kit bag, you never know when you'll need it.

Anyway a 700 warm up gave me a pretty ropey 41.11 for 7th place, it might've been a lot better if I'd decided to go when the gun went rather than let everyone else go first and then (ever so politely) follow them in.

Road Trip Day 6 August 5th - Proof you can't stuff a pint in a half pint pot!

Day 6 is the 200 free day. For me this is a bit of a non event really, it's the least worst evil of the other events I could swim which include a 400 IM (non merci) and a 50 fly (non merci absolutement). But I need to keep the momentum going so the 200 free sort of serves that purpose.

By this time I'm pretty much into a routine with all my swims being in the afternoon including a lunchtime wander into a local supermarket for sandwiches. 

Which wonderfully illustrates what's great about these meets. 

You know you're wandering around a new city and you keep bumping in to your mates. So entering the supermarket on Sunday I was immediately confronted by Dave Akers and posed for a selfie at the fish counter (as you do)... (is it a selfie if someone else takes it?)

Anyway back to my 200 and the valiant attempt to have this post bear some relation to its title.  Down to the pool for a warm up, then disaster struck. There I was struggling into my racing suit, and having just successfully negotiated the rather unyielding fabric over my more generous contours (i.e the worst bit over,) when the material gave way and my fingers tore through the suit. Bu**er and Botheration! It wasn't the fact the suit was a right off but all that the wasted effort in putting the bl**dy thing on.

Nothing else for it but back to baggy suit (well a more baggy racing suit!), (Judy Hattle do you have any more castoffs for me?) and into marshalling (suitably late) one of the more eccentric features of this meet is the timekeeper who,is accompanied by a dog. Honest not a big Labrador but a little poodley type thing. You just would never get that at home would you?

But in swim terms 700 warm up and a 2:45 something or other.

Road Trip Day 5 The Swimming Pool at the end of the Universe

Day 2 featured the 100 metres breaststroke at the Temporary Pool. This is situated on the next island and involved a warm up at the main complex and then a wander across the St Lawrence river to the F1 Race track where the temporary pool stood. It's probably a little over a kilometre between the two venues.

Now don't get me wrong the pool is great but the facilities are a little primitive to say the least and consist of a couple of portacabins as makeshift changing rooms and initially 5 portaloos. Now I'm not sure about you but (at the risk of giving too much information) I don't find it particularly inspiring to have to use facilities which effectively contain the biggest pile of poo you've ever seen. (I mentioned yesterday about the flight fright or sh**e syndrome).

The trick to these events is to try and locate the best facilities, i.e the cleanest, quietest loos with an infinite amount of loo roll. A stop at a bike, kayak and segway hire store on Saturday and I lucked out as I discovered a set of air conditioned pristine loos with running water!

So I was feeling quite smug as I changed and waited for my race, marshalling was the usual pain in the derriere although my accidental entry time (2:23) for the 200 breast was rumbled in conversation with a couple of swimmers. The actual swim was exquisitely painful and all I could think about was how much the 200 is going to hurt on Friday!

1:33.55 but yet again faster than Swansea and a 7th place

Road Trip Day 4 It all starts here, Sandbagger Binge (Sunday 3rd August)

The World Championships generally start with the 800 free which is quite a gentle introduction to the meet, (if you are an official or spectator that is.)

However if you are a swimmer it is 16 lengths of gut wrenching agony and more pain then you can ever imagine, particularly if you decide to use your legs.

Before you get into the water you have to run the gauntlet of the warm up pool, intersperced with an infinite number of loo stops as the flight, fight or shi*e refexes kick in, and then when you think you can"t go anymore you have to struggle into your racing suit.

As if this wasn't sufficient cruel and unusual punishment then you have to make your way through marshalling.

For the uninitiated this is where you play a sort of musical chairs, as your heat gradually moves up through rows of chairs until you are released onto the pool side.

Sadly though this isn't a case where the music stops and you are out if you haven't secured a chair, because the next row has exactly the right number of chairs and you just move up and sit on your designated seat.

Now in my early days at this, I adopted all sorts of tactics to avoid the non musical chairs as I hated marshalling, and I would try my best to simply pop up on the pool side as late as possible. Now having gone through this process about a zillion times I'm pretty relaxed about it.

It does give you the opportunity to chat to your fellow competitors and weigh them up, and it can get pretty tense I can't imagine what it's like in the call room at the Olympics. Anyway eventually it's your turn and you're under starters orders.

I dived in determined to stick to my breathing pattern, every 6 for the first 50 and then settle down to every 4. A Canadian next to me went off  like train and that was it race plan out of the window as I set off to hunt her down.

This took all of 100 metres and then I gradually built up a nice lead to win my heat by quite a margin, I'd carefully calculated my entry time by doubling my Eindhoven time and then adding a bit. So a pretty good start as my time was about 17 seconds faster than Swansea and I moved from about 25th to 16th in the rankings.

Warm Up 1000
800 free 11:51.42
Swim Down 800

Road Trip Day 3 - Out of the frying pan......The Quest for a Swim Continues

So day 3 and in search of a pool for some training we (Binge, Crystal and the Cronies) head off for the Claude Robbalot (A Canadian Robin Hood?) pool for training.

By the time we got off the Metro and started the walk to the pool ably guided by sherpa Helen KP (who had very cleverly made the trek here yesterday) we found ourselves leading a long snaking crocodile of swimmers from all over the world.

It was a case of out of the frying pan into the fire because the three lanes set aside for training were woefully inadequate and I chose to swim in the unlaned outside part. In fact it looked a lot worse than it actually was and once you managed to select a spot and jump in it was fine. Although navigating around some older Japanese breaststrokers was a bit of a challenge.

I swam about 60 lengths and after checking the time was disappointed to discover I had been in the water for over 30 minutes urgh horribly slow!.

I then began to pay attention to my stroke count and realised that the pool length must've been 30 metres and not 25! I felt better after that but there was no stopping as it was on to the British Masters Drinks reception, a great opportunity to catch up with the other swimmers out here.

As you can see this motley crew were in great spirits and many thanks to Sharon for her organisational talents and the patriotic but rather phallic balloons!

Back on the Metro for the Opening Ceremony at the Olympic Park, again in company of thousands of swimmers. The start time was down as 7:30pm but it was 8:00pm before the event got underway, (probably foreshadowing what's to come).

The ceremony kicked off with an energetic Canadian? Irish? eastern European Band and a pretty large conga was soon going around the crowd. Who were enjoying the opportunity to show off their team colours.

A good proportion of British in an excellent demonstration of our national traits of reserve and sarcasm preferred to stand at the back and send up the acts.

Deciding that life was too short, to listen to a succession of Canadian and FINA officials drone on; or to watch a Canadian impersonator;

(well do you know any famous Canadian people) (ok well apart from Michael J Fox, Celine Dion, Michael Buble, Ben Johnson alright I give up)

But more importantly the queues for the portaloos and at the beer wagon were too long we gave up and headed back into town


Swimming starts tomorrow and I need to regroup and try and focus on the 800 Free (seemed like a good idea on the entry form).  I reckon I covered around 1800 metres again pretty comfortably. Astonishingly I survived the day and wasn't abducted by aliens. Maybe I look too weird!

Road Trip Day 2 - The Quest for a Swim

As mentioned yesterday the Synchro and Water Polo championships were taking up all the available pool space at the Parc Jean Drapeau making a training swim an unlikely prospect. 

Binge, Crystal and her Cronies decided that they would do a little sight seeing tour, and try their luck at training at 7 pm. Cunningly Binge didn't mention her ulterior motive to locate a Ben and Jerry's ice cream shop. 

Mission accomplished: whilst Crystal and her Cronies were buying smoothies and fruit, Binge found herself drawn to a triple scoop cup of frozen deliciousness, (spot the real swimmer in this lot) 

Anyway onto the pool this evening where you took your life in your hands as the world and his wife had the same idea. It was warm up carnage. 

It seemed to me to be pretty obvious that if you invite close on 6000 swimmers for a competition from the far flung corners of the world they are going to arrive fairly early to cope with the effects of jet lag, and yes somewhat predictably they are going to want to swim.

In a rather unusual move the organisers had thoughtfully arranged for a rock festival to take place a matter of 50 metres away from the pools. 

Whilst this provided a level of background entertainment, and made travelling to the venue on the Metro an excellent opportunity to get up close and personal with Montreal's youth, 
it caused havoc with the pools electronics and as a result the Water Polo and Synchro competitions were suspended for  about 45 minutes because of an electronics failure when the big stage started up. 

Perhaps less predictably all of the remaining polo matches then went to extra time and penalties (with surprisingly no English teams involved). This caused a delay in opening the warm up pool, and with 5779 swimmers  (give or take a few) hanging around desperate for a dip the brave few squeezed into half an unlaned 50 metre pool.

Taking my life into my hands I ventured into the water. This was extreme white knuckle swimming and thank you to the twat in my lane ( and that's a very loose term) who thought he would swim butterfly turning the white knuckle experience into a black and blue knuckle one. 

After about 300 meters the rest of the pool opened up and the pool staff arranged for the lane ropes to be put in and things calmed down. A civilised flop of around 600 metres simply to get wet and stretch out.

Road Trip Day 1 (a very long day 1) . Starving and Shattered at 41,000 feet but validated by Facebook.

My pre meet preparation was as ideal as ever, consisting of the obligatory late night in the office sticking the proverbial fingers in dykes (12:15am escape);

Half way home realising I'd left my laptop charger, bu**er; turning round and being forced to run the gamut of the office burglar alarm....again. 

Arriving home around 12:30am where I made myself exceedingly popular with Bob and Teenage Triathlete, by crashing around the house packing or rather chucking half a dozen t shirts, 3 pairs of shorts, 2 warm up suits, 2 racing suits 2 pairs of goggles and as many clean pairs of knickers as I could find not to mention enough electronic gadgets to start up a PC World franchise, in a bag. 3 hours 25 mins in bed then up and off to the airport. 

06:25am flight from Newcastle to Paris (well how else would,you get to Montreal? and it's French isn't it?)  

By 12 noon (5pm UK time) I found myself starving and shattered at 41,000 feet  What I hadn't factored into the equation was rain.....we landed amidst a thunderstorm and oh my goodness il fait pleut.

Catching the shuttle to the Fairmont Hotel to collect my accreditation, proved to be very painless although the ensuing two hours was anything but; the rain threw a spanner into the works and forced a change of plan. I had intended to walk down the road to my hotel, but the rain kind of kiboshed that idea, so I was directed to the metro via one of those unfathomable underground cities that Canadians seem so fond of. 

The Elusive Montreal Metro

Naturally I got totally lost and somehow completely missed the Metro station, surfacing in the pouring rain, god knows where, I scuttled into a nearby Starbucks to regroup and work out where I was. 

20 minutes and a grande latte later, I reckoned I was orientated and anyway by now the sun was shining. So dragging suitcase behind me I set out for my lodgings... unbeknown to me in completely the right direction!  About 1000 metres up the road I suffered a crisis of confidence and decided that I was going in completely the wrong direction so I retraced my steps and eventually found myself back at the Fairmount. 

Now I'm not sure why my default setting in these circumstances doesn't just scream taxi at me! but it didn't, so back to plan A; a straight walk along the road where I arrived at the rather dated and dismal although reassuringly cheap Travelodge!

Unfortunately my troubles were not over.  Despite producing confirmation of booking (thoughtfully provided by Jayne "crystal" Ball) the hotel had no record of me and the clerk wasn't impressed by my explanation and failure to be able to immediately telephone Crystal who was travelling up from Toronto, so no check in. 

I'm not sure how desperate I must've looked having covered probably 3 miles of Montreal sidewalk dragging a rather hastily packed suitcase! but it did add an air of relentlessness and persuasiveness to my argument. 

The guy eventually caved in and gave me the room key when I provided about a zillion Facebook conversations I was able to pull up on my  phone (which by now was running as low on energy as I was and his patience was tested a bit by the 81 email notifications which kept interrupting the Facebook search.) The clincher to the argument might've been "trust me I'm a lawyer!"

Anyway, Dropped bags, showered, changed and headed out to the pool hoping for a swim... sadly not to be. The Synchro and Water Polo competitions were in full flow. So wandered around the merchandising tent which I reckon will be simply impossible to get moved in later on in the week and spoiled myself with a new rucksack. 

Checked out the competition pools and the walk between them (very long) but more on this later.

Returned to the Hovel where Crystal and Cronies turned up, out for dinner (I'd last eaten anything substantial about 12 hours beforehand) just about falling asleep in my Lasagne. Perked up by ice cream for pud!

Crashed out by 10, woken at 10:20pm by Duty Solicitor Service "good morning Miss Dobbie we have an own client case at Durham!" I guess he'll have to wait a bit for me to get there!