About 2 weeks ago I took my sister and her hubbie climbing and after they were done, they reckoned that their two daughters might get a kick out of it. So I arranged to bring them to the climbing centre in Dingle because coincidentally that would be the nearest one to them at the time.

I wasn’t feeling 100 per cent myself on the day in question so…hmmmm. However, the girls had a ball. The youngest one in particular had a whale of a time on the high ropes. She does a lot of climbing of trees and stuff so no one was really surprised when she turned out to be the best climber of the lot of us. She asked me very nicely about the high ropes thing so I said, yes, provided she didn’t mind getting drenched. The weather in Dingle was not good. She went up on a group of three having just about passed the height test (there was about an inch in it) and duly terrified the two lads, both of whom she just laughed at. I wish I was 8 years old again to be honest.

Play at Height is a really nice climbing wall. If I were going back there again myself, I’d go with a climbing/belay partner but if you’ve got kids, the autobelays are way more than adequate. And there was a steady stream of kids in there last Saturday.

It’s on days like that though…that things somehow go right.

Lifeguard minimum swimming standard is the ability to do 400m in under 8 minutes. When I was backstroking, I was coming in at around 40-45seconds for 25 m which isn’t exactly highspeed but it’s pretty okay for a non- competitive swimmer particularly since I used to stop at 1600m not because I was tired but because I typically had to be somewhere else.

But if I want to hit that 400m/8minutes target, and possibly do the lifeguard training, I was going to have to learn to freestyle properly and start pulling down the speed and pushing up the distance. For me, the distance issue is linked to breathing technique and on that I have typically sucked because of sinus problems caused by chlorinated water. Which, incidentally, is why I backstroked.

Armed with a noseclip (I now have lots of them) and some determination I spent Saturday trying to push up the distance and although it’s far short of 400m, it’s increasing. Slowly.

When I started this a week or so ago, I expected that I’d push up the distance first because that’s what happened when I was training before. I built up the stamina to do the distances before I started cutting time off the distance. I know that to do 400m, I need to be able to do 16 lengths of the short pool or 8 lengths of the long pool which basically wound up at an average of 30seconds to cover 25 m.

When I timed a couple of 25 m lengths last week I was coming in at 33seconds per length which meant I was about 10% over time. I would have been back distance training tonight only the pool was packed. So I was speed training on short hops. Somewhat to my surprise the first timed length came in at 31.8 seconds. This is a pretty decent improvement, but it wasn’t the limit. Currently on my stop watch is a time of 29.58 seconds which brings me comfortably within range of my target speedwise.

And that makes the distance side of things a whole lot easier to face.

In a way, that’s the season that is closest to my heart although I was just 15 years old at the time and Formula 1 wasn’t shown on television. Sunday and Monday morning newspapers were argued over to know who had said what to whom the day before and which one of them actually managed to win.

And that was my brother’s fault. He loved cars and motorsports. And it’s his fault I read car, Performance Car, Fast Lane and the motorsports reports on Monday’s Cork Examiner.

He died in 1994, a few weeks after Ayrton Senna did, albeit in very different circumstances and he went to his grave a Michael Schumacher fan. In a way, I often feel he was lucky not to be disillusioned by the German the way I was. At the end of 1994. Watching interviews through the 1995 season in German which were just…soul destroying they were so hypocritical some times. Being disqualified on one occasion from the championship. Michael Schumacher might have the best results record in Formula 1 but too many of his escapades over the years left a nasty taste in my mouth. And he’s back this year.

I feel a certin misgiving about that. If nothing else, I really feel the old drivers should quit when they are old. There are plenty of young and up and coming drivers who merit the time and opportunity. If you have Michael Schumacher in a racing car now, I am not sure it’s because you feel he’s going to win races, but because he is going to bring commercial bonuses. In a way, the sport hasn’t changed so much since I stopped watching it.

He’s not the only one though. Jarno Trulli is still there. Rubens Barrichello. These guys are old. Schumacher, 41. Barrichello, 38 in may. Trulli, 36.  And it’s not really like either Trulli or Barrichello ever delivered on any promise they showed 20 years ago.

Maybe the sport itself is dying too. It’s hardly a sport any environmental movement is likely to support much, and maybe the youngsters who would have done it 10 years ago are now kitesurfing, skateboarding, playing ice hockey. Doing things that don’t necessarily involve the same financial commitment as motorsports did. I don’t know.

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Love the song but it’s not currently on iTunes.

I did ask for advice but options were limited. As the dude said to me “If you’re going to jump into a 5m deep pool, you’re going to get water up your nose. Either you get used to it or you stop doing it.”

How do I feel about this? I don’t give up on stuff easily – generally. I might never succeed at it, but I generally give it a decent shot and try to shove past the limits each time. I couldn’t manage it with the diving though. It’s one thing to come up gasping for air after diving into a deep pool, it’s another thing if you’re fighting for breath after surfacing as well. It typically took 24 hours to recover each of the two times. I swore on Thursday that I was not inflicting that on myself again. Not deliberately anyway. At least I tried.

I’m assured no one actually wants to watch all 4 minutes of this but for anyone who’s really interested, there is another 10 minutes of this at home.

Anyway, this morning, dawned bright and sunny. Complete lack of rain so no phone call from Mondello to tell me it wasn’t worth my while driving down. Frankly, the sun was splitting the stones in Kildare. Coldish but not what you’d call outrageously freezing. I was happy.

Some background. I used to drive karts about 10 years ago. Nothing very serious, it was my dangerous sport of choice while I was living in Brussels. That and ice skating. Oh, and shopping in Virgin Megastore on a Saturday. Just one of those things I did to get me out of the apartment. But I haven’t done it since I left Brussels and while I’ve done loads of other dangerous type things such as whitewater rafting and other unrelated stuffy, I haven’t been in any sort of a racing mechanical implement since about 1998. Feck. It was never supposed to be that long. Theoretically I know stuff like flag signals, and racing lines and all that jazz.

I used to dream of being a rally driver too. I sort of feel that rally drivers are the rugby players of the motorsports world and that the Formula 1 drivers are the soccor players. Nothing against Formula 1 – I worshipped Mika Hakkinen. But I loved Colin McRae. This may explain the events this afternoon.

Mondello Park is great. It’s near Dublin and it’s got nice people. I’m going to get that spoke in now, because I might forget to thank Conor the instructor and Roger, the guy who took care of me, Ken the chief instructor and the girls in the office who checked my USB key was okay. These are the people who made my afternoon.

When you get down there, you sign in, you do briefing, you get kitted out and stuff. Driving suits are warm. Warm. WARM in block capital letters. This is important to know. My body wasn’t prepared for this because it’s used to being abused and dragged down onto freezing cold beaches into freezing cold water. Yesterday, for example, it was on a beach in Sligo taking photographs without the benefit of a pair of long johns. I can handle cold. The heat, that’s a different kettle of fish. Then there’s the helmet which was a hell of a lot lighter than I expected. I don’t know why I expected it to be a tonne weight. I think it’s because when I see people wearing them, they look top heavy or something.

Then you meet Conor. Conor has been a driving instructor for years. He’s been with Mondello I think ten years now and he used to race single seaters. He drives first and he drives increasingly faster around the circuit. Now normally…if my body temperature is normal, ie about 6 degrees below what it is inside this racing suit and helmet – and the briefing makes special mention of the fire extinguisher as an added bonus – this would be fine. The second thing I noticed in the instructor laps was a touch of nausea. I couldn’t be sick. I sure as hell wasn’t hungover. And I know how this works because hell…I’ve been there before on smaller little fecking things on shorter tracks with a bunch of Belgians who had aspirations of getting to Spa Francorchamps in August. They even paint the bloody racing line on the track for you. The first thing I noticed was that the racing straights were somewhat shorter than I expected but that’s only important when I’m driving myself.

Mondello Racing School has helpful signs around the place like “Brake” and “Turn In” and “Apex” and “Exit”. They are particularly important for the single seater, particularly the “Brake” one. For me, it was not quite so important, really, not at this point.

So Conor, he did a bunch of laps and I strived to remember things like where what red traffic cone was, and what gear I should be in when I got to each turn. I’ll say this. I’ve had years of doing stupid things like working out which Formula 1 driver was faster around the various tracks during qualifying and knowing the answer before idiot ITV told me simply by paying a load of attention to laps and incamera shots of laps. But it really is 100% different when you’re actually in the damn car. Even now, I can’t quite equate the circuit to the map I carefully studied in briefing. It made a hell of a lot more sense in the car than it did even in the briefing and certainly on the map. When he was done, we swapped places. And I was terrible.

Truly terrible. I wanted to be brilliant of course. I know how my mind works, it goes slowly as I get familiar with something and then whump, away like lightning. Whump didn’t happen. Whump didn’t happen for all sorts of reasons such as 1) I really wasn’t that comfortable sitting in the seat which was designed for people who don’t have hips. Not me, in other words. In fact, my entrance and exit into the roll cage were an interesting mix of total grace and total lack of grace. It’s quite some achievement to be simultaneously not graceful and graceful, I have to say. They don’t give medals for it. 2) it was a Mazda 3 and I really wasn’t all that comfortable with it “yet”. So I failed in my endeavour to be brilliant. Boohoo.

Following this, there was a consultation that went “we think you could probably do the single seater alright but I honestly don’t think you have the confidence so….maybe more laps in the saloon car.” I said yes. Definitely more laps in the saloon car, I’m right on that. I did more laps in the saloon car. They put a transponder on it so that I could pick up some lap times and walk out with proof that I’d actually done this. More proof, that is, than what the video camera was recording.

The second lot of laps in the saloon car were 5 million times better than the first lot. I don’t know why, maybe more legroom or something, me more relaxed, don’t know. I didn’t care, all I knew is that I knew the track better, felt more comfortable in the car and could identify the racing line. And, more specifically – could identify my mistakes. I sent a bunch of very consistant laptimes of around 1.24 which, compared to the laptimes that the non-wusses were setting on the single seaters – which are basically big karts (so I keep telling my head) – is kinda slow but which compared to what I did on round one, was very good. And for a saloon car…not bad. Fairly okay was a frequent comment from the instructor.

Would I do this again? Damn right and I am planning to do it again, probably early next year so that I don’t have to reclimb the learning curve, except this time I will risk getting into the single seater. Would I give it to someone else to do, yes, that too. Next boyfriend, that’s your present for Christmas, truly. Unless he wants to do icehockey or something.

The staff at Mondello are terrific. John Fair who was involved in getting me in there in the first place, Rog and Conor today. There is video but I have not worked out how to extract the bits into a file that I can throw up on Youtube – yet.

Obligatory plug: Mondello Racing School.

Lesson one involved jumping into the 5m deep water. Off the side of the pool and off the springboard and if you were feeling particularly brave – and I was not – off the 3m platform.

I’ve mixed feelings about all this now. In part, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for ages – it’s almost a key reason that I’m a member of the NAC gym (swim only membership), and I’m not entirely sure. It might have something to do with a story I read when I was about 8 and I’m too old to do gymnastics or be a figure skater now. But I do a lot of watersports.

There is one minor issue. When I swim, I wear a nose clip to protect myself from godalmighty sinus problems shortly after swimming. I forgot to bring one on Wednesday which is unusual (there’s nearly always one in the swimming bag) but it’s academic. I’m pretty sure the instructor mentioned that I wouldn’t be wearing one because they fell off too easily while diving. This is an unholy mess for me because when I say that the most memorable feature of Wednesday’s diving lesson was the absolutely awful sinus problems I had afterwards, I am not joking. So much so that despite vague notions about the beauty and grace and all that of diving, I really don’t know if I’ll be able to continue with it if I have another episode like Wednesday night. Either that or I find a noseclip that’s tight enough to contend with the moment of impact. Otherwise I will definitely stop sooner rather than later.

I’d like to point out that this diving business is not scuba – I’ve already tried that one before (in public too), but artistic somersaulty stuff – well that’s the idea anyway.

But there are some things I will never ever try and caving is one of them. It’s not even something I really thought about too much until a week or two ago when there was something on RTE 1 that I caught a few moments of about a cave rescue in Clare. I don’t want to go into it, but even if you skip the details that the piece was about a rescue, the pictures by no means enticed me to give it a try. Didn’t make my blood rush, made it stop instead.

However, I have a twitter feed and for some odd reason, I don’t know why, people with an interest in extreme sports occasionally find me and if I like the look of their feed, I follow them back. One such posts a lot of extreme sports links, things I would never have found on my own. Today, they posted a link to this site. If you are even remotely squeamish, I strongly recommend against reading the piece because in some ways – a lot of ways – it’s harrowing. It involves under water caving, something I will never, ever do because despite the interest in assorted watersports, one of the ways of dying that terrifies me more than most others is drowning (the other is dying in a fire). I have nightmares about both and it’s probably why I will always ever so slightly doubt myself as a swimmer no matter how good and strong I get at it.

If you bear in mind I won’t go into a cave in the dry, and I’m terrified of drowning, you can be sure that this is why I will never get involved in underwater caving or cave diving. Choose your term. As far as normal scuba is concerned, I would only try it a second time just to get more out of it than I did the one time I did an introductory lesson.

This story is not about people who made it; it’s about people who didn’t. Some of it…is hard to swallow, particularly when you realise that the death of the key character in the story is caught almost completely on the camera that he was wearing on his helmet. The piece left me just a little emotionally battered, I have to say.

Society spends a lot of time – sometimes – protecting people from themselves.  I’ve mixed feelings, sometimes, about whether this is a good thing or not. I’ve always taken the view that people who know what they are doing; know the risks attached to what they are doing should be free to do it. People who are utterly stupid about it, they need to be saved from themselves.

The two guys in this story; they knew what they were doing, they knew the risks. I can’t condemn them for doing it anyway because…somehow, not doing it makes their lives a little bit worse. I am not sure that this is a good idea for them either. It just…leaves behind harrowing stories sometimes.

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interesting site which I discovered to day as a result of all this. CrazyJourneys.

Anyway, the article is suitably enthusiastic. For those who do not want to taint their browsing experience by clicking on a Guardian link, it’s how you, as an environmentally responsible skier living somewhere in the UK can make your way to the ski slopes by train instead of sullying up the environment by flying.

It is well up on carbon costs. It is not well up on financial or time costs. Now, if you’re an environmental activists, the cost on the financial or time side is not going to matter too much to you but in the real world, it matters to people.

Here is London Chamonix. Journey time, approximately 15 hours, including an overnighter, cost, 142 sterling. Sorry. From 142 sterling return. The overnighter only runs on the weekend as well, both out and inbound.

It’s an interesting idea. However, the “why go by train” page is disengenuous. All that scenery? Not if you’re overnighting the trip. Extra days? Doubt it…Look at the schedules for the overnighters. Look at the day cost on a day spent in the train. Changing trains in Paris? From Paris Nord to Paris Austerlitz? With a load of sports equipment?

I love trains. Mostly, when I go to Brittany I fly into Paris and get the train across from Montparnasse to either Vannes or Quimper. But I really think this is a bit unrealistic in terms of how easy it is to do. From Ireland, absent a rail connection to somewhere on the European mainland it is completely unrealistic.

If you’re interested in giving it a shot, however, here is the website in question.