Training Log Archive: blairtrewinIn the 1 days ending Sep 9, 2016:
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Friday Sep 9, 2016 #
Event: London City Race Weekend
8 AM
Swimming 32:00 [2] 0.9 km (35:33 / km)
As promised last week, this week I took to the waters of Lake Geneva for my swimming session at the Bains de Paquis - a lot quieter than they are in the evenings (as evidenced by the fact that there was no-one to collect the 2-franc entrance fee). I don't think I've done a swim training session in 'natural' waters since one at Edith Falls in the NT on the 2009 trip, and one difference with that is that Lake Geneva definitely has no crocodiles (even freshwater ones).
Felt a bit strange at the start but OK after the first few minutes - didn't quite judge the distance of my circuit around the two pontoons right and pulled up a little shorter than I normally would. In one direction I was going straight into the sun and seeing the right direction for the pontoon wasn't easy, but the tower whose shadow looks like a minaret (the construction of which was banned a few years ago in one of the less glorious moments of Swiss direct democracy) was a useful landmark.
The outside of the Hotel President Wilson was crawling with police (some heavily armed), and the slightly-more-distant outside was crawling with news cameras, which I took to be an indication that Somebody Important was in town - not infrequent in this part of the world. Some subsequent searching revealed that the Somebody Important was probably John Kerry, here to meet with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the name of making probably limited or non-existent progress towards stopping the war in Syria.
Off to London for the weekend tonight, with a bit of adventure on the way to the airport on the number 28 bus; we had to divert because of a crash, and once off the normal route it gradually became apparent that the driver didn't have a clue where he was or where he was going. A fellow passenger came to the rescue with a map on his phone (although the map wasn't always great at identifying which streets were bus-suitable, so we went over a few gutters). Eventually made it to the airport about 20 minutes after we were supposed to.
Felt a bit strange at the start but OK after the first few minutes - didn't quite judge the distance of my circuit around the two pontoons right and pulled up a little shorter than I normally would. In one direction I was going straight into the sun and seeing the right direction for the pontoon wasn't easy, but the tower whose shadow looks like a minaret (the construction of which was banned a few years ago in one of the less glorious moments of Swiss direct democracy) was a useful landmark.
The outside of the Hotel President Wilson was crawling with police (some heavily armed), and the slightly-more-distant outside was crawling with news cameras, which I took to be an indication that Somebody Important was in town - not infrequent in this part of the world. Some subsequent searching revealed that the Somebody Important was probably John Kerry, here to meet with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the name of making probably limited or non-existent progress towards stopping the war in Syria.
Off to London for the weekend tonight, with a bit of adventure on the way to the airport on the number 28 bus; we had to divert because of a crash, and once off the normal route it gradually became apparent that the driver didn't have a clue where he was or where he was going. A fellow passenger came to the rescue with a map on his phone (although the map wasn't always great at identifying which streets were bus-suitable, so we went over a few gutters). Eventually made it to the airport about 20 minutes after we were supposed to.