Things that strike me

Via family machinations, I was at Billy Elliot in a London theatre on Thursday night. It doesn’t count quite as West End cos it’s closer to Victoria than anywhere else, being called the Victoria Palace.

Without going into the minutiae, I have to say I enjoyed it. Music not my favourite, but some terrific dancing, fairly decent script (ie one million times better than the We Will Rock You script). Social backdrop probably went over the heads of al ot of people in the theatre.

I enjoyed it. Not going to rate it or anything like that but if you’re free of a night in London, it’s good entertainment.

Today, it seems like half the entire toddler population in Clontarf was at the swimming pool. And the swim club were training in the 50m section of the pool.

Don’t get me wrong. I love that Westwood is basically kid friendly, that you can get family membership and by and large, the kids are generally well behaved. But today, there were loads of them. It may be because the weather was kinda changeable so going to the beach was not necessarily a good option if it was likely to start spitting rain, for example. I can vouch for the fact that getting rain soaked is not a good idea. I get given out to when I do it too so don’t anyone tell anyone else that I got drenched on Thursday. I digress.

Anyway, now that I am sort of back swimming [if we skip over the little detail of not going for 10 days owing to trips to Cork, Kerry and London] I have also started reading my Total Immersion book. I am questioning the wisdom. Last time out I was sprinting 25m in under 30 seconds. This was good.

Today, while trying to remember the bits about keeping my body long in the water, and trying to slice through the water like a yacht rather than a barge (I kid you not – see chapter 2 or so), I managed to sprint 25m [once - when I didn't have to duck around toddlers and babies] in 35 seconds. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. The whole training session = disaster more or less. I didn’t cover the distance I wanted to cover (even if I couldn’t chain the lengths), and about the only thing that could be considered positive was a compare between the total immersion-ish technique and my more usual messed up freestyle was that yes, the total immersion technique is more efficient in terms of distance/number of strokes.  So realistically I might well be better off dropping the speed again, per original plan, and working more on that technique on the grounds that I’ll make better progress at the far end.

God I really need to get that 400m chained up though. Not wanting to put myself under any pressure but I’m going to Achill kitesurfing in 3 or 4 weeks’ time and the objective was to be sufficiently close to it by then so that I could address the whole kitebuying side of things more closely.

In the future, I won’t be going swimming at 3pm on a Saturday. Not if it’s going to be backed like it was today anyway.

From the total immersion freestyle forum.

And I often wonder why so many people go to martial arts as a means of self discovery. I now believe that the reason is martial arts has a very immediate evidence of false judgements about yourself. If I think my skills are better than they are, I end up hurting a lot. If I choose the wrong approach, I end up flat on the floor with pretty lights drifting around my head.

I quite like the idea of the pretty lights. Which is probably not the right answer.

I have, for the first time in a while, complete liberty in deciding what to do for my holidays. This hasn’t happened in about 4 years because I’ve done group/family holidays for the last while.

I know these holidays will be in September. If I thought I could hang in there until November, I would, and then bankrupt myself by going to Hawaii for big wave season. However, I’m already jaded and hunted and permanently tired which means it’s September or bust.

I have options. They are as follows:

1. Lacanau, south of France and the ASP World Tour. This is especially attractive because Kelly Slater is leading the world championship. He’s wone 9 previous championships and is probably the greatest surfer of all time. He is 38 years old. I would like to see him surf at least once.
2. Vlieland, Holland, and the PKRA world tour stop in Holland. This is especially attractive because the current world kite freestyle champion is Dutch; his name is Kevin Langaree and I have photographed him before. As a photography subject he rocks.
3. San Francisco, southern California. One of the few places in the US I really want to go. The other is Yosemite National Park.

Realistically, Lacanau is topping the poll at the moment. I don’t want to spend my entire holiday on the beach gazing adoringly at Kelly Slater however; I’d like to take some photographs, maybe do some surfing myself, and maybe go kitesurfing. In part, I want to do things but not feel under any pressure.

I have 3 or 4 days booked off in August to go kitesurfing in Achill Island. I’m looking forward to that and if it goes according to plan I’ll be doing a bit more kitesurfing in Dublin before the summer dies out.

So I will.

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.

Dragged my sorry ass out to the swimming pool today. It was hard searching out the motivation to do so and I don’t know why that is. Still tired after the last day I guess.

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.

When I get invited to hen parties they involve party gift sets involving feather boas and older women – sisters-in-law making every sort of fecking innuendo going.

I was at one that was based in Clonakilty once. WIth the silly penis straws and all that jazz. Can’t really see the attraction.

But I horrified them. Clon is not too far away from Inchydoney – so on both mornings of the weekend, I got up and went surfing.

They were shocked. Particularly on Sunday because they all had hangovers and were moaning about ending up in the bar in the rugby club. The idea that someone might be insane enough to get up at 9am on Sunday morning and go surfing for two hours – and Christ I am a lousy surfer anyway – was completely outside their ken. They couldn’t understand it.

So I’m a bit wary of hen parties because I drink precious little, can’t function past 1am and generally like doing stuff rather than suffering hangovers. Today I find out that some people have hen parties in the climbing wall in Dingle.

I uhem….

need to consider the people I hang out with.

My body is somewhat broken. Today I have made it pump a kite. Which is good for the kite. I did that because owing to reasons outside my control, I didn’t manage to go swimming at 8am this morning although I would have been up on time. I did, however, go swimming this evening, and then after that I turned right and went to the climbing wall. This was perhaps not wise as now I am physically jaded.

Sometime in the not too distant future I’ll be designing a cute piece of art work with a thermometer – that looks wrong – and an F-One Bandit 3 or whatever replaces it in August (cos it’s usually around then we start hearing about the new season’s kites).

The deal is this. If I can front crawl 400m, preferably in 8 minutes, by the start of August, and if I get up on my board in Achill Island on my 5000th attempt to be some way competent a kitesurfer, my reward will be a 9 or 10 metre Bandit 3. It is going to be a long slog.

I am not as fit as I used to be and that’s because I haven’t gotten much exercise beyond occasional climbing. This is obviously something I want to turn around.

In the past, I’ve been significantly fitter; in that I could swim 1600m which sounds hugely impressive. But then again, it’s not bad either. But I backstroked. Only backstroked. However, there are practical applications to being able to swim forward (you can see where you’re going) and if I’m going to be doing more kitesurfing, then it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to be a fitter swimmer in a practical self rescue sense. I’ve already had to swim in an inflated kite once. It sucks.

No. IT SUCKS BIG TIME.

So I’m back in the swimming pool swearing because you know not only can I not front crawl 400 m – because I never could – but I can’t backstroke worth a 5cent coin at the moment. And that bit is soul destroying because 1600 m down to 25 is pretty bad, really.

So currently I can string about 40m together front crawl which means I’m 10% of the distance there distance wise. I haven’t half drowned myself yet. My sinuses are not going berserk the way they did after the diving saga last November. Where I am now is pathetic but not overwhelming.

I quite like swimming. I feel far better after it than I do after walking or running, for example, and it’s a useful tool for, as I say, the kitesurfing. I’m also looking at going to France at the end of September to go to an ASP event in Hossegor or Lacanau or wherever they think they’ll have waves, and if I can, I’ll try to go back surfing again. I could do with the body strength to paddle as well. And a few people reckon that the additional upperbody strength will help the climbing which, post swim today, was an utter fiasco. Oops.

It doesn’t. And today I’d really like to ask Liz Kearney and her subeditor one simple question.

Why the hell did you not consider height as an issue when writing this piece of utter drivel?

If you read the whole piece of nonsense, you’ll see this quote.

Of course, because dress sizes vary so much from retailer to retailer, and because they are not based on standardised measurements, they don’t represent an accurate indicator of weight or health, so it certainly isn’t true to say that anyone wearing a size 14 has a problem. That will depend on your frame and height.

This is fine in itself. The entire rest of the article gives the overwhelming impression that being a size 14 is, in fact, a problem. I haven’t been a size 14 since I was about 19 years old, but that’s fine.

There’s something that makes me very, very angry about this, or it would, if I could be bothered to dig up the rage. About 5 years ago I came to the conclusion that the fixation on weight alone was not really healthy and I stopped and started looking at fitness levels instead. The HSE has actually caught up with this.

I’d like to see the shift away from focusing on things like BMI and instead get the mind to enjoy the process of becoming fitter and the sense of wellbeing that comes from a more active and healthy lifestyle.

The problem I have with the rest of the article is it doesn’t actually concentrate on this. It concentrates on how you’re lying to yourself if you’re a 14 and think you’re healthy.

The whole issue of health and stuff annoys me as far as the media is concerned. If you concentrate on weight, I’m not 100% healthy. But by the equivalent token, I do not drink and I do not smoke and as a result, am probably healthier than some people who do one or both of those activities to excess. I’m also 5 foot ten inches tall.

If the article was even remotely balanced, it wouldn’t concentrate on the whoe size 14 thing with as scant recognition of height/build as it did. Basically, the assumption is that the same rules apply to all women, except for that little caveat.

But the truth is a little more complex than that and this is something which the article doesn’t recognise. There are confounding factors.

When people are overweight and obese, by becoming fit they protect themselves from many of the health risks of obesity,” says Ailis Brosnan. “An overweight fit person has a much improved health profile than a lean unfit person.”

Replacing stuff I love.

About 6 years ago I bought a Neil Pryde wetsuit. It was in the sale in Surf Dock, and it was end of line, heavily discounted. It was a Jenna de Rosnay endorsed suit, full windsurfing. I bought because at the time, I occasionally went windsurfing in Malahide and had gotten sick of wearing hire wetsuits. I also loosely started kitesurfing at the time and it had a full wind protection which you don’t get on so many of the wetsuits for kitesurfers. Although it hasn’t been overworked by wetsuit standards – I have friends who have six month old wetsuits that have had more work – it’s probably not going to last too much longer.

I love that wetsuit for a couple of reasons. A key one is that it was designed for women which, at the time, wasn’t always straightforward to find. I have hips. I have breasts. In fact, where breasts are concerned, I have plenty of them. Breasts and hips and mens’ wetsuits are a drag. I hate trying on wetsuits.

But it’s dying slowly and I have to face the fact that I may need a new wetsuit. NeilPryde do two brands now, the Neil Pryde brand and the NPX brand. NPX is available in my local kitesurfing shop and normally I’d go for them, except for one small detail. NPX stop manufacturing wetsuits one size smaller than I need. I’m not a supermodel, and I have DD cup breasts. I need a size 18 wetsuit and NPX stop at 16. Bummer. It’s worse than buying jeans.

On the plus side (I suppose) I ordered flipflops from Ipanema this morning. I bought some in Spain last year that I loved and I want similar so fingers crossed they materialise soon.

No, seriously.

Mr Kenny said: ‘Fine Gael is united and focused on the major challenge facing the party and the country.

‘That challenge is to replace this disastrous Government with a better alternative that will get our people back to work and our country back on track.

Dude, you have no idea. The challenge is not to replace the government – we have elections for that purpose. No, the issue is to create some sort of vision that people can buy into.

And pay off the Anglo related debts. Enda Boy, I don’t think you have it.

Fine Gael. Clueless. Who the hell am I supposed to vote for next time round? Is Eamon Gilmore going to continue walking the fine line that is not being Fianna Fail and not saying dumb nonsense like Enda Kenny?