Day 116 has seen 240 metres swum, a message of encouragement, a concerning attack of the fizzing wobbles, two children safely back from skiing, a yummy tea cooked and a curling match played in.
Some more admin done and then I needed to take some exercise. I was originally going to go to the gym for an Upper Body Resistance Training Session but wapped last minute for a swim. Let’s see if I can add another 2 lengths on to the swim and do 12 lengths (240 metres) without repercussion. I checked the timetable for public swimming timings and realised that I could catch a bus which would get me to Callander on time to catch the 1200 to 1300 swim. I made a mental note of the bus time and carried on with some more planning for future challenge activity. Time to catch the bus I packed my swimming bag and left the house in time to catch the bus. Got it. Walked up to McLaren Leisure Centre in perfect time to catch the end of the public swimming session!! Somehow I had lost track of the plan and caught a bus an hour later than I needed to. The next session started at 1440hrs. That gave me an hour and forty minutes to walk back down to the village for lunch and back up again for the next session. Frustrated with my own stupidity I decided to go and catch some happy smiles from Julie, Debbie and the team in the Deli Ecosse. As I walked down I did feel a little sluggish in the legs and couldn’t understand how I had made such a hash of the timings but shrugged it off remembering that I had had a good two days fast walking and running on the legs so they were probably just a little tired and that before there was any idea of a Brain Tumour a few years ago I had managed to miss the clocks going forward an hour in March so arrived at the church for the service just as they were leaving at the end of the service!! It happens.
In the Deli Ecosse I had a lovely welcome and a lovely lunch of an egg sandwich with a large salad followed by a flapjack and a lactose free decaf Mocha. I had plenty of time so took it, chatting to Debbie and Julie and reading about some good looking walks on the Cowal Peninsular before paying up, thanking the girls and heading up to the leisure centre in time for the start of public swimming. I got the times mixed up again and arrived a full 30 minutes early. This was getting very annoying and I didn’t want to walk back down the hill to the town again so went upstairs to the leisure centre café to sit and enjoy the view. I am so glad that I did because I bumped in to Penny and her husband Gordon. The delightfully encouraging Penny was the lady I shared a shower with after the last swim, and introduced the challenge to. She looked it up with her husband, the wonderful and ever reliable Gordon who drives the number A1 bus which is a lovely wiggly local bus, very popular, in the most part I guess because Gordon looks after his passengers’ so jolly well. I knew them both well therefore but my increasingly frustrating brain took a while to connect names and faces and events to make an initial positive recognition as to who I was talking too even though I knew that I knew them well. Penny and Gordon had done their research on the Challenge so understood, were very patient and eventually the brain clicked. We had a quick chat and then Penny gave me a hugely encouraging message. Penny has a friend who received a serious brain injury as a result of a motorcycle accident 2 years ago. The hospital didn’t think that she would survive the night. She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t talk and had a terrible prediction for her chance of recovering at all. However, supported and encouraged by her family and friends something clicked and she decided to fight. By fighting 24hrs a day for the last 2 years she can now walk. She can now talk. In fact, if you were to meet her you would have little idea of the severity of the trauma she had fought back from. Her secret? Little steps. It was a very powerful message for which I thanked them for delivering. It had already been a little challenging today. Nothing dramatic just little hints of cognitive failure as I struggled to hold on to information, recall recent events, faces and information, or just to get to the right place at the right time. Little did I know how important this message was going to be for me later in the day. It was time to go swimming and I hoped, in fact prayed that a good swim would bring me back into normal running.
I changed and showered, introduced myself to the lifeguard and jumped in to the single lane so that he could keep a close eye on me. 12 lengths. 240 metres to go and I felt great. 4 lengths breaststroke, 2 lengths backstroke, 2 lengths front crawl doing my usual of breathing on alternate sides on every third stroke. Another 2 lengths front crawl and another 2 lengths breaststroke cool down. I concentrated hard on making each and every stroke as dynamic, effortless and efficient as possible and for the first time in a very long time my strokes actually felt together. I was enjoying the swimming and was reminded of the many miles that we probably swam in the Army Modern Pentathlon Team in which I was lucky enough to be invited to attend full time training to try and get a men’s team into the Sydney 2000 olympics. With the 5 very different disciplines of running, swimming, pistol shooting, fencing and horse riding full time training was just that. 12 hour days of hard physical work to get some quality training in on each discipline each and every day with the additional strategic game planning and training to get around weaknesses such as my big one fencing. I had never fenced before and it was too late to catch up to the international level Pentathletes who had come in to the sport from fencing. But with a clever game plan and lots and lots and lots of practice I produced a strategy that ensured that I was winning at least 50% of my matches which was enough to keep me competitive in the whole competition, where as if I had tried to fence traditionally I would have been lucky to have won even just a 1% of my matches which was clearly not nearly enough to remain competitive. 12 hours a day 5 days a week of hard graft but we loved the challenge and the excitement of seeing if we could get there. In the end I got promoted to Captain and pulled from the training plan. It felt harsh at the time but in the end the Men’s team never quite made the cut to go although Steph Cook and Kate Allenby from the UK team won Gold and Silver. I was listening on the BBC World Service in the desert in Jordan on a radio lent to me by my boss and caught some rather odd looks from the Bedouin who were camped close by as I jumped for joy to celebrate the success of these two thoroughly well deserved medals.