Ouch... and counting down to Malta

This morning I went to the hospital for steroid injections into my dodgy knee - I've been absolutely dreading it. My fear was so visible to everyone present that the very nice nurse offered to hold my hand; I decided that a woman of 41 should be able to do such things without hand-holding and declined, even though I really wanted to, and settled instead for clamping my hand over my face and not removing it until it was all over. Holding the hand of a kind stranger would probably have been more dignified, but whatever works... Anyway, it wasn't anything like as bad as I had feared (and as various people from the triathlon and swimming clubs had assured me it would be!), although apparently I'm going to know about it later, once the local anaesthetic they put in before the steroids wears off. So, no more training this week on doctor's orders to let the steroids do their stuff and my knee settle down before I head off to Malta on Friday.

Speaking of which... I've been following the blogs of Juliann Galloway and Lisa Cummins, both of whom are in Malta this week on the first long-distance training camp of the season. I was hoping that they would give me a sense of what to expect, but Julieann has already blogged to say that Total Body Confusion is the order of the day on the trip and she doesn't want to give anything away to those joining the later trips. For a control freak like me, this is very disturbing. I wonder if I'm in the right sport...

Getting started

Well...this is my first attempt at blogging, but here goes.

I'm training to swim the English Channel - I'm booked with pilot Paul Foreman to swim on the tide beginning August 17th, 2010; I'm also going to be joining a three person relay in August 2009 with some triathlon colleagues. I've always thought it would be an amazing thing to do, but never even imagined trying it until last summer, when I met several people who'd swum it. One thing led to another, and before I knew where I was, I'd booked a pilot and was actually going to do it! This is the perfect time to try. For the last few years, I've been doing triathlon (which is great fun, even though I'm shockingly bad at it), but in early 2008, a niggly knee injury put me out of running / cycling action, leaving me to focus on swimming, which was always my favourite bit of triathlon anyway.

I'm currently training with several local clubs - Warwick University Triathlon Club, Coventry Triathletes and City of Coventry Swimming Club (Masters) - up to about 25km a week. It's hard to know how much I should be doing, or what else I should be doing, but I'm reading as much as I can and for now, am happy to be learning as I go. Next week, I'm off to Malta with Swimtrek for one of their long-distance training camps, so hopefully I'll learn more there; I'm also hoping to have a go at the 6-hour qualification swim, although given that my longest swim so far has been 3 hours, that's probably a bit optimistic. Still....plenty of time yet; it's a big adventure.