Thanks to Suzie and Russell Needham for having the foresight and benevolence to stump up for a delightful shack in the dunes of Gwythian Towans….OK, so they’ve had it for years and they love it to bits (I fully understand why), btu thanks all the same for allowing me to rtade staying there for massages they were happy to pay for! It gave us 3 nights 3mins walk form the sea. Byron, Dylan and I went down to allow me some quality me time- eg face down in the water.
There is no way on earth I am ever going to be able to repay Byron for all the help and support he’s given me, so I’m just going to have to acceed to a limp thank you and hope he understands. It’s a bit like the national deficit, whichever method of calculating billions and trillions you use, once there are that many zeros, piggy banks are not going to dent it. Needless to say, Byron, you ROCK!
I swam without the kayak support so got into the habit of hour sessions….this was 2 fold useful. it meant I could jolt my metabolism by doing 2 in a day and thereby demanding my body get really efficient by stuffing 5 chocolate mini rolls, 5 jaffa cakes and a pint of warm chocolate energy drink down my gullet just before diving into the frigid bloody waters and also to retrain my body to be used to that hour as a start off fuelling period for Dover. Did you know there are 114cal in a mini roll? And that you can ram them in your pie hole at a frightening rate? Yup. Y’can. They disintegrate pretty fast, I can tell you. As can jaffa cakes, which have the benefit of a touch of citric tang but lose out on the calorific front by being a light weight 94cal.
To explain the incredulity of this, there are 109 cal in a sachet of Torq energy gel…..scientific fodder has nothing on a mini roll.
Had the best swim of the year so far on weds evening- second swim of the day. I had an afternoon nap and stuffed my bleary face as soon as I woke up as a test to see what it would be like if (as will probably be the case) I start the swim in the middle of the night. Staggered into the water and just got my head down. And it felt good. Really good. Yeah, it was windy and choppy, but my body just turned on the radiator and remembered how to churn the arms. Tiredness in this case actually played to my advantage as my head just left me alone and I felt calm, clear and free. I’ll be replaying that one a few times in the channel, I can tell you.
18 days to Dover