Seahorse Swim Dorset

You wait for ages for a blog post and then three come along at once.  At least, that's the plan as I have three that need to be written!  I have a shiny new laptop on loan so there is no excuse.

First up is a swim that I did at the start of July, the 3.8k Seahorse Swim from Studland beach in Dorset.  Mr JKS and I decided to make a mini break out of it and had a lovely afternoon in Dorchester (where we visited the Teddy Bear Museum, the Dinosaur Museum and bought some Dorset Knobs), and a night in Weymouth before getting to Studland on the Sunday morning.

I'd had a slightly mixed run up to the event.  I was swimming incredibly well on the Wednesday before.  Then on Wednesday afternoon I went KneeBoarding for the first time.  This was great fun but after only 3 goes, my arms felt like they were about to fall out of their sockets, so I sat and watched for the rest of the session.  Unfortunately, the day after, my arms were totally shot to pieces.  I'd been looking forward to a tuning up massage but instead, Jo had to try to make my arms move even a little bit.  I got grumpier and grumpier as Sunday approached and even the morning of the race saw Mr JKS trying to ease my triceps.

I got into the water not having particularly high hopes for success.  I'm never especially fast in the sea and with arms that didn't quite pull properly I felt especially underwhelmed.  However, I wanted to give it my best shot and I did.  There were 2 diamond shaped laps, with pretty equal legs for each side of the diamond, although there was obviously a bit of current/wind in one direction.  I swam as hard as I could and really put my head down for the final leg in.  I exited the water in around 1h5 feeling pretty pleased with myself as I had given it my best shot.

There were lots of very fast and experienced sea swimmers there, mostly swimming without wetsuits, so it was difficult to know where I had finished.  We were in a hurry to get off as Mr JKS needed to do a long run in the afternoon.

The next day I was looking online to see if the finish times were available to confirm the time that I thought that I had done.  As I scanned through the race report here to get to the bit with the results on, I suddenly to my surprise spotted my name!  Although I had been slow by some standards, it turned out that I was actually the fastest westsuit female!  (I would like to note that my time was TWELVE minutes slower than the fastest non wetsuit female).  I emailed and apologised profusely to the organisers and it turned out that I had won a crystal trophy.  Luckily I have an amazing friend who is a courier and he happened to be in Dorset the following week and very kindly picked it up for me.