Swim

My first memory's of swimming were at the local pool when i was 5/6yrs. My mother and her friend used to alternate weekly who took me and my friend where we used to splash about diving in and trying our hardest to drown each other. We became fairly competent swimmers at an early age with spending so much time in the water and we were just as at home in the water as we were on dry land. We struck lucky as we grew up with a new swimming club (The Louth Dolphins) just being formed and it seemed fitting to join with our love for the water plus I think our parents probably hoped it would help us sleep better with all the energy we had.

(At the time Louth didn't have an awful lot of clubs about for kids of our age, the dolphins are still going strong today turning out some top class swimmers http://louth-dolphins.org.uk/)

As time went on we started to compete; I like to think I did reasonably well. We used to travel up and down the country to different galas and it became the norm. I would start to recognize the faces of the people I competed against and even at a young age we all had huge respect for each other. I used to love the buzz of standing on the starting block waiting for the gun to sound and feeling like a nervous wreck for the whole swim, although I can look back now and say 'yeah I didn't do to bad did I?' at the time it was hard to see as the standard from our club was so high it was hard to stand out with some swimmers continuing on to make the final picks for future Olympics and my friend eventually living out his dream of a solo channel crossing. Unfortunately for me, I've always liked my food and used to be a bigger build than some of the other racing snakes; my mum used to say I was built for endurance, but we both knew I just liked cake! I still wonder how much further I could have got in them days if I wasn't carrying the weight ? The dream didn't last forever though and as I approached teenage years I lost interest in swimming and my swimming career would lay dormant for a few years.

Skip forward to 2012; the year of the Great British Olympics. I religiously watched the games that summer taking great pride in our nation and seeing how well we did, I still had an itch that needed to be scratched although at the time I didn't know what that itch was and although I had moved on from being a quiet x box loving cider drinking teenager and back into a life style of keeping fit I hadn't competed for a long time. I remember watching the Brownlees and thinking 'yeah I could do that' but had no idea how to get involved. Once again being in the right place at the right time, a local Triathlon club formed in late 2012 early 2013. This answered my question and I decided I didn't want to be shown up so started swimming on my own at the beginning of spring 2013 to see if I could even remember how to do it, it turns out swimming is like riding a bike, its one of those skills that once learnt it stays with you. Only a few weeks later and I had entered my first Triathlon (Lincoln's David Lloyd sprint triathlon). 6 weeks didn't leave me with a lot of time to prepare for this but it left me with enough :) .