This year is my third year in competitive swimming, and I am still seeking improvement. However, I spent half of my last winter training in short distance stuff (ice swimming), and after returning from my holiday, I found out that I lost a lot of speed, and it was too tiring to go to the pool after my full-time work, so I nearly stopped swimming until Parliament Hill Lido returned to the summer timetable with evening sessions. My result last…
After Eastbourne Triathlon was weathered out, I wanted to do another one to see where my ability was. I looked at my calendar and 29 / 30 June was the only weekend when I was available to race, and I looked at British Triathlon website to find a race on this weekend, with a flat bike course and a flat run course. I eventually narrowed myself into choosing between Cardiff and Torquay. I eventually signed up for Torquay because it…
Yesterday I raced an early season aquathon as a preparation for later triathlon races this season. I chose Eastbourne as the race to do because it is not far from London, has a sea swim and flat run. I registered for the standard distance aquathon, with 1500 m swim (against the tide to the pier and with the tide back), and a 10 km run along the promenade. I didn’t want to do the bike leg because it was too…
More photos to be added later. On 13 January, I did my craziest thing in my life: flying from the UK to Austria to swim a 250 m race and back in the UK within 24 hours. Motivation I want to get started in ice swimming, but unfortunately the UK doesn’t have enough opportunities for me to do that. There was only 1 race under IISA in the whole winter in December, the national championships, which was sold out in…
I did the race Cold Half the third time as a solo this year on 4 February. I completed the race in 5:14:26 in 2020 and 4:53:47 in 2021. However, I skipped the 2023 edition because pandemic-related travel restrictions were still in place in Hong Kong, and I had emigrated to the UK already. My intention was to go back to Hong Kong and race every year. Training Unfortunately, I didn’t have much training before this race. I now have…
It’s the third new year since I moved to the UK, and in the past year I settled my life in London and recovered from some of my past failure in my life. Achievements in the year Career As my business didn’t take off, I returned to the job market, and started my role as a software engineer at Jnction in March. It is a rail consultancy with a number of innovative projects using rail data which I worked on…
I visited the Netherlands between 2023-12-14 and 2023-12-17, which was my first overseas trip from the UK without flying. I personally don’t like flying on airlines compared to other forms of public transport, mainly because it is a hassle to go to airports which are usually far away from the city centre, the strict airline security, the limited ability to carry luggage, and the need to book early as there is a strict limit on how many people a plane…
It has been a month since I swam across the English Channel from England to France. It was a magical feeling when I walked onto the shore at Le Petit Blanc Nez after entering the sea at Shakespeare Beach 18 hours and 21 minutes before, but the journey was incredibly tough, and it was nowhere near perfection. I made many irrecoverable mistakes during my preparation resulting in 2 years of time and opportunity cost lost, which would be valued at…
If you are a Travelcard (or Freedom Pass) holder, you are allowed to use a combination of it and an extension ticket to make a through journey across the zonal boundary, and the train is not required to call at the boundary station. This article shows a demonstration to buy an extension ticket, called boundary fare, on London Underground machines. Some other ticket machines sell them, including those operated by c2c, London Overground and Scheidt & Bachmann (S&B) ticket machines…
This article focuses solely on my journey to my second attempt of the English Channel. I will publish an article later for an overview of my whole journey from the point I started thinking about doing this in 2018. As mentioned before, after failing my Channel swim attempt in 2021, I had no intention to retry the swim in the near future. However, I made my second attempt on 2023-09-07 and got a provisional success in 18 hours, 21 minutes….