Last year I discovered why the Lake District is called that. I always thought it was a funny name for a bunch of pretty mountains and lots of cars. But it turns out there are all these big deep cold lakes, and you are allowed to swim in almost all of them!
Ullswater 500m, 1 mile (1610m - don't ask me why it isn't a sensible 1500m!), and 3.5km swims were last Sunday. The 500m (84 finishers) is perhaps the beginners event. The 3.5km is pretty much ironman practice distance and the standard was high. However, it was so cold that this event was reduced to 2.5km. The 1 mile was equally cold (11.8C brrrr.) but they made us do the whole thing! 292 people finished this one, including me and James. I got round 6 minutes quicker than James which makes the difference between us in swimming and running about the same, but the other way round! But somehow James came out more inspired. My race was a bit of a fist fight. Whereas a week ago at Leeds I was swimming among a wave of elegant, lithe, lightweight, coordinated, fit but middle aged women, when it comes to pure swimming, the big, the fat, the young and the male tend to trounce lightweight middle-aged elegance! I was completely unprepared for being half overtaken by thrashing behemoths doing front crawl who then collapsed into breaststroke for few strokes thus entangling all their kicky limbs among mine. The way out is to kick violently, but this does take quite a lot of energy. Next time! Still, a reaction of annoyance rather than panic is encouraging I suppose. I am still not sure how to overtake these people, however, as it is really hard to get around widely flailing limbs in a packed field, and trying to draft behind them doesn't really work. 
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