Thank God It's Friday

17 degrees this morning! It is getting colder. This is most probably due to the recent rains but a bit worrying as I expect the Channel is also getting colder as well.

Just myself and Heath this morning for a session accompanied by a gaggle of triathletes who now seem to be doing a regular Friday morning swim.

Getting a little bored of the usual swim up to the weir so we headed off downstream this morning to start with, past the boatyard and down towards Bourne End. It's quite a nice stretch down this way and the river starts to narrow a fair bit so you have to be on guard about boats/sculls as it would be quite easy to get into a bit of trouble.

We felt the cold as soon as we got in and the best way to deal with it is just to swim at a pretty hard pace so that you keep your body relatively warm. Heath set off first and I was trailing him trying to catch up all the way until after the island after the boatyard. I got to about level but could not get ahead of Heath.

After the island the river opens up and as we got there the sun was just coming up although it was still so low you could hardly feel the benefit. We stopped for a few seconds to take in the scenery and then turned round for the long slog back upstream. It had taken about 15 mins to get there and it took 35 mins to head back to the start which is a good indication of how strong the stream in the river actually is.

We swam pretty much together all the way up and I was trying to break away from Heath every so often. Heath was wise to this so upped his pace when I did and stuck to me like a limpet. Come the last 500 I really pushed to try and get away and despite my best efforts I couldn't shake Heath who doggedly stuck with me. The pace kept increasing and we cruised past some of the triathletes that were finishing their swim and pretty much ended up sprinting. Great stuff!

The fact that we were pushing so hard help keep the cold away despite the fact that we felt pretty numb after the swim.

Have attached some photos from this morning and a picture of the "castle house" I was talking about earlier.

Planning to do a swim on early Sunday morning but I think that this is dependent on how many beers I have at Twickenham on Saturday!