I participated in the BLDSA Champion of Champions (Dover) on 18 June. This was my first swim race in the year but it didn’t went well. The race format was 3 races on the day, 5, 3 then 1 miles, with each mile consisting of 2 x a 800 m triangular loop, i.e. 10 laps for 5 miles, 6 laps for 3 miles, and 2 laps for 1 mile. The full result is available on the BLDSA website. 5 miles…
From 5 May to 9 May, I went on my second overseas trip after I moved to the UK. I only visited a single city on this trip, Vilnius. This trip, which is my 4th time visiting Lithuania, marks the completion of my travel list to all Baltic capitals, i.e. Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn, and also completes my visit to the 3 biggest Lithuanian cities: Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipeda. This was also my first trip after Europe returned to normality….
In the Easter weekend I went to South Wales, with a group of friends, Himmy Lao, Jason Wong and Mikołaj Dutkowski, to participate in one of the major orienteering race series, the JK. There were 4 consecutive days of racing from Good Friday to Easter Monday. We all lived in different places, with me lived in Bournemouth, Himmy and Jason lived in London, and Mikołaj came from Poland, so we met at Bristol and travelled together. Day 1: Sprint &…
A year ago, on 20 April, I landed the UK for my first time in life and took a minicab from Heathrow Airport to Bournemouth. I hoped that it would be an exciting start of a new life. However, it didn’t. Instead, in the past year, I failed everything in my life. First was, my Channel swim. Adding to the insult, I pissed off all the swim groups in Bournemouth when I read that Chloë McCardel became the Queen of…
On the last weekend of March, I did the relay and TrailO races of British Orienteering Championships. Saturday The long championship race and a British TrailO League race were held on Saturday. I didn’t join the long race because I didn’t have the ability to run an M21 course in the long race, and I only did the TrailO race afterwards. The TrailO race was held in Highfield & Brookham Schools, Liphook, which was within walking distance from Liphook railway…
I went to Scotland last week for the second time this year, but this time I travelled overland instead of flying from England. I went there to do Sprint Scotland, which consisted of 3 sprint orienteering races, with the second race in knock-out sprint format. The race was held in Dundee. Although there is an airport just next to the race venue, the only airline serving it is Loganair for London City. The next nearest airport is Edinburgh which has…
I did my first running race after the pandemic, Battersea Park Half Marathon, on last Saturday. I originally wanted to do a running race October last year but it was postponed to February this year due to a storm, and got blown out again on the 5th attempt of running the race so the race was cancelled. I signed up this half marathon just 3 days before the race. Background Before the COVID pandemic, I ran my first half marathon…
In the National Rail system, there may be different reasonable routes between two stations to make a journey. For example, to travel from Bournemouth from Horley (one stop north of Gatwick Airport), I can either first take a South Western Railway service to Southampton Central and change to a Southern service to London Victoria alighting, or take the South Western Railway service all the way to Clapham Junction and change to a Southern service back to Brighton there. Now these…
Today is the final day of 2021, the time to make a conclusion of the year. In short, my life in this year is a total disaster, a complete failure in life, as I gave up everything to prepare a once-in-a-lifetime challenge but eventually failed for it. Review of the year Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my list for 2021 was scaled down to only 3 items, but I still got only 1 out of 3 done: to get a…
It’s one week since my disaster and I still can’t make my mind out of it. Everything was very wrong. It was the worst moment in my life. I really shouldn’t have tried it at all before I am completely ready. I totally underestimated the difficulty of Channel swimming, thinking it’s not much different to swim 14-16 km along the coast. Let me start with my motivation. The primary reasons I signed up to do the Channel were: as a…