sunday swim

The weather really chose the weekend's activities. Brilliant sunshine on Saturday and Monday and horror stories on Sunday for the Nat XC at Falkirk. No point in saving myself for the nightmare xc when I am not racing at the standard I would like to be. So it made way more sense and was a lot more fun to go for 2 longer runs Saturday and Monday (which I was taking off for another TB special) and do the Gullane thing on Sunday. Bit naughty missing the Nationals but the number of times I have turned up there without much of a team from Porty... 

And it was good spending time with the Yak. We were both dreading the process, both the run and swim - just not a nice day for either. So we put jackets on and reluctantly left the car after quite a bit of near hysteria.

There was a LOT of malarkey. It worked well to offset the dreich weather and we had a lot of very upbeat banter about all manner of stuff. We were trying not to think about the misery of the swim beyond the run.

A high tide had left this extra water above the normal tide line .

While Mary was doing yoga exercises on the beach (like a grown up) I was (childishly) trying to photo cockenzie between her legs.

We were both a bit tired and got distracted at shell corner. It is easy to get pulled in by the myriad of shapes and colours. Once you start looking closely it pulls you in and you wake up half an hour later with pockets full of jewels.

I loved this impressionistic shot of a wave breaking over the thermometer. It was 3' in the air and water today and we got changed into wet suits rather reluctantly in the car. Which makes it difficult to put the wetsuit on properly. I like to try and zip myself in without help as sometimes Mary isn't there to help but feeling a bit useless I got M to zip me in.

Yup, this exactly.

Some days it goes well and everything works. Not today - the goggles were not sealing properly and loads of water was getting in the neck gap between hood and collar.

This photo would suggest Mary hadn't quite snugged the zip up fully and pulled the velcro cover over - which would explain why every time I swam hard to get warmed up a bucket of icy water was tossed down my torso. Not a day to stay in for long.

Yak complete with horns.

We ran up and down the beach, we did star jumps, we swam. We even did some disco moves as we pretty much had the drizzly beach to ourselves. But we called it a day pretty quickly and headed back to the van where quite a bit of squalking went on while getting back into warm clothes. I then filed a request for Gullane Superfry as I was still v hungry from Saturday's 33miler. Mary suggested we raid the co-op next door. Which turned out to be a much better option. Hot chips would have been welcome but would have sat like lego blocks afterwards. Instead we had a ton of oatcakes cheese and olives and I had a bar of fudge as well. As the rain fell on the car. Not the best day ever but not the worst either and we had made the most of it.