Like swimming in beef Oxo and going after the wrong buoy 1

It was a small mistake to make. Sending my entry forms and fees off to Loughborough for the British Open Water Championships 2009 suggested, at least to my rather befuddled and overloaded mind, that the swim – 3k of it – would be somewhere in the vicinity around Loughborough way. It had needed a bit of a wiggle to get my entry in before the closing date but with the prospect of a 5k sea race at the Europeans in September, getting my toes wet in a lake in Loughborough over a reasonably manageable distance seemed a fair strategy. Except the swim wasn’t in Loughborough (why oh why don’t I read the small print) and it wasn’t in a lake. It turned out, because luckily someone did read the small print and told me, that my destination was not Leicestershire but the County of Durham. When I looked at the map I found that Stockton upon Tees (yes, that’s right) is a flipping long way north. As I allowed this small but crucial piece of information to sink in whilst sitting on the edge of the pool during a breather from our training session, I wondered if I should pull out, making humblest apologies for being such a dimwit. But, I decided, nothing ventured nothing gained and feeling better for my ebullience I dived into the water and watched my vision blur as my goggles rose slowly to the top of the pool unfortunately loosing contact with my head in the process. With a sigh I tightened the elastic, stuck them back on and wondered whether this was a sign. As it so happens it was.