Brighton – Clapham Junction / Waterloo cheap ticket blocked
Contacting customer service about the use of a valid ticket combination results the combination becoming invalid.
London Region Open Water Championships
Today I raced again in a regional open water championships under Swim England rules, my second year to do so. Now I have joined South London Swimming Club so I raced for a London club in the London regional competition for a national qualifying place. The top 3 in each age group in the national distance (5 km for 19+) are qualified into the nationals. I wanted to do this race because I would like to see if I could…
Avoiding the world’s most expensive metro fare for my commute
It has been a long time since my last post about my life in the UK. I have finally got a job which goes well in London since March this year, which is a rail consulting company, and I am a full-stack developer in the company. Unfortunately it is located in Central London (the closest stations are Chancery Lane and Farringdon), understandable because the company wants people to commute by rail as Farringdon is the central point of the rail…
BLDSA Champion of Champions (Dover)
The open water race season has started and my first event is BLDSA Champion of Champions. This event is 3 races, 5 miles, 3 miles and 1 mile, held successively on the same day, with the ranking determined by the total time. The race course was a triangular loop of 800 m length, i.e. 10 laps, 6 laps and 2 laps for the 3 races respectively. 5 miles The water temperature was reported as 15.3°C by the organiser. It was…
2022 year review
The year is coming to the end and it’s time to refer back to what I wrote at the beginning of the year, to see what I have done and what I have failed in this year. This year is, again, another disaster as I have failed so many things, including my job and my marathon swim. The failures are now affecting me so much that I can no longer get on with my life. My achievements in career, swimming…
English Channel relay swim
Update 2022-11-22: Unfortunately our swim ended up as a DQ due to the a failed changeover at 04:52. According to the observer log, Ingrid missed the deadline and entered the water at 04:55, making my 1st shift overrun by 3 minutes. As a result the swim was declared invalid by the CS&PF committee. We hope to try again in 2023. All times in this article are in British Summer Time (UTC+1). Photo credit to my crew Paul Cribb unless otherwise…
Train trip to the North West and Midlands
On the last weekend I had my second long-distance train trip this year in order to do races in the North West and Midlands. Although the trip ended up nice, the preparation was a mess and I had to written off a few tickets due to changes of circumstances. Trip planning I was going for a race in Windermere, from the south to the north. The race registration was 07:15 – 08:00 at Fell Foot Park which was also where…
Race report: BLDSA Windermere
Today, I attempted to do my second marathon swim race this year but unfortunately I didn’t end up well. I pulled myself out just 3.5 km from the finish due to extreme leg pain. This blog article is only about the race itself. My marvellous train journeys will be described in another article coming later. Motivation The race of swimming the whole length of Windermere, at 16.5 km, is one of the longer distance marathon swimming races in the UK,…
Race report: SEOUL Nailsworth
On the summer bank holiday, I went to Nailsworth to race orienteering. It was a very steep courses with plenty of route choices and contour reading. In order to save words I ain’t going to show every leg here, only those with significant route choices. 5 to 6 I and the majority of people used the blue route (1513 m), but a few used the green route (1608 m). There were 7 up-contours after the valley on the final part…
What will be my future?
It has now been 11 months since my swimming life has been damaged, and 6 months since I lost my job in Bournemouth. I moved to North West London in June instead of South London as originally planned, mainly because the train service is too bad there with most lines only running every half an hour in South London. North London is dominated by TfL-run services, including Tube and Overground, while South London is dominated by National Rail services run…