#Janathon Day 12 – Big Bad DOMS

I have a funny relationship with swimming. I’m not very good at it and I don’t really enjoy it, but in a weird way I also do, BUT only in completely empty pools with no strangers in.

I like that the cool water stops you overheating and how easy it is to just switch off, and I do like “faffing” around in a pool doing stretches and in water weight bearing exercises, but I also find it incredibly boring, like I do most indoor cardio exercise on machines and the like, there’s only so long I want to stare at a spot on the wall for!

Anyway, today I had little choice in the matter as I have DOMS so bad that unfolding myself out of a chair takes a good few seconds, and the chance that I could persuade my legs to run an actual mile outside in the rain were close to none.

So at 11:30am I made the most of my self employed status by taking myself down to the hotel pool for a quick pre lunch swim. Only to find it occupied by who I now believe are the “puddle ducks” a mother and baby learn to swim class for ages 0-4. The pool was full of things that I believe Americans call Pool Noodles. I don’t know what we call them, probably “those floaty foam things”.

In any case, not wishing to join in with the Mother & Baby class I returned to my room, ate my lunch, and went back to the pool just before 2pm.

I swam for half an hour, excepting a few minutes when, freaked out by the fact that I’d had to leave my handbag in an unlocked locker as I didn’t have a pound coin, it suddenly occurred to me that given that the pool was empty I could actually bring it in with me and went to fetch it.

I have to alternate between breast stroke and back stroke as the back of my neck aches after a while, and as I splashed and huffed my way around the pool I thought with amusement about the email I received last summer inviting me to try out Open Water swimming. I can’t imagine that my special brand of flapping and swirling my arms and legs around would really cut it on a open water swim. The day I enter a Triathlon is very far off.

Half way through I realised I had unconsciously started swimming in derby direction (or anti clockwise as the rest of the world calls it) so I turned around and completed the rest of my laps clockwise. I don’t know what I thought that would achieve, but it felt kind of rebellious.

A huge disappointment was that the sauna was out of order for maintenance. The best bit about swimming is getting to sit in a sauna at the end for 10 minutes, plus I had high hopes it might help sort out my sinuses, but oh well, first world problems and all that.

The good thing about spending a few days in a hotel this week is the availability of a pool. The bad thing is the non availability of my foam roller, which I think would really help right about now. Instead I am going to have a steamy shower in the hope that it will invade my poor blocked sinuses with steamy goodness and stop me wheezing, yes that’s right folks, my magic medication is either failing again, or I have a whole new post cold infection to deal with, whoop.

Anyway, Janathon Day 12 is done and dusted, and now, we stretch.