Like swimming in beef Oxo and going after the wrong buoy 5

Other than the sound of a teenager leaning out of her window and screaming at her boyfriend at 5am and the stark sound of speeding police cars with their sirens blaring we passed a quiet and uneventful night in Darlington. My car was still there in the morning and in one piece which I hadn’t entirely been banking on. As I left the hotel I made a mental note to erase both it and the pub next door from my mind for perpetuity.  Never again would I eat somewhere where the chicken in the chicken-burger was conspicuous by its absence and chips are cited as the ‘healthy option’.

The roads were quiet at 9am and with my trusty ‘Nicnav’ in place, we headed out eastwards along the A66 to Stockton and our destination – the river Tees. The sun was shining and the sky a blue we hadn’t seen in some time. The race, a 3 kilometer open water event held at the Castlegate Quay in Stockton-upon-Tees was a first for both me and Nic in terms of destination (though not Nic in terms of open water competitions) and whilst that made it exciting, not knowing what or who we were up against, it also made it more nerve racking. Not least because for this event we weren’t allowed wetsuits and it was very difficult to gauge in advance what the temperature of the water would be. My training session in the lake at Bosworth Waterpark the week before was swim in a very respectable 18.2 degrees. Positively balmy by UK standards. But having swum outdoors in Namibia earlier in the year in water that ripped the breath from my body and gave me a headache for the first 100m I remembered what it might be like and mentally braced myself. Having struck off early from Darlington and after an easy twenty minute drive we were almost the first to arrive and parked up in the car park of the local Mecca bingo hall. I figured that if I got laughed off the start line then at least I could go and console myself with a couple of rounds of bingo with ladies who might remind me of my grandma. That made me recall an actual evening out with my grandma at her local bingo hall in Peterborough when I was in my twenties. A tad overconfident on arrival at the venue, I hadn’t expected to be surrounded by competitive eighty year olds with the minds of a super-computer and the steely resolve of a group of mafia dons fighting a turf war. Needless to say I came away battered and bruised. And skint.

The administration of the race was impressively organised by individuals in suitably official attire who wandered around carrying clipboards with what looked like very important details on. This bolstered my confident somewhat. So did the number of watersport club members who had pitched up ready to assist in case of problems in the water and who were busy launching kayaks and gliding off in a stately manner to key positions around the course. Having been furnished with our competitor numbers on white latex hats, Nic and I retired to the changing rooms to put on our ‘skins’. These are a bit like those Trinny & Suzanna magic knickers but in a fetching (I jest) neck to knee combination. Skins sure do hoik you up and suck you in and there have been moments when I have considered wearing them under my attire of an evening. Unfortunately they also flatten your chest and as I don’t want to be mistaken for Jamie Lee Curtis - though I have a lot more hair and there’s never been any rumours about hermaphroditism for me – I’ve given them a miss. So far at least.