In the lake again. three days after the last sunshine and I’m not sure what the temperature was, but I was armed with my wet suit, and even a little early morning drizzle wasn’t going to put me off. It’s 17 days to go and there’s no guarantee of the weather. Anyway, the wetsuit would keep me warm 
There were about 5 or 6 of us in the water. One lady had decided to drop in whilst on holiday in the area, keeping fit for the Henley Swim. She wasn’t wearing a wetsuit, a hardy soul. The Henley Swim is quite an appealing race; to swim the course of the Henley Regatta at dawn sounds magical. I’m considering adding it to the “Bucket List” (After I’ve done the Great North Swim there isn’t much left on there, so, why not? – Will you join me next year?).
Back to the wetsuit. I was determined to learn from the previous experience. I’d watched the videos again and had the plastic bags and the talc to hand. I haven’t seen anybody else using plastic bags, and felt a little self-conscious so I decided to try a variation of methods. For feet, socks worked in the same way as the bags. Talc, used slightly less liberally than on the video, helped pulling the suit up past the knees. This amount of talc was not enough for the arms, so the plastic bags came into use. Using talc made a big difference. However, as I pulled the suit up my arms towards the shoulders, I was aware that the sleeve was getting narrower and tighter around the bicep, I began to worry restricting my arms during the pull, and stopped pulling the suit up. This is something I need to experiment with for best comfort swimming.
Last time I had a problem with water entering the neckline, so paid a little more attention to how this was fastened. This time it was fastened snuggly with the velcro fastening overlapping almost perfectly. No water in the suit this time! Sighting was a little easier and I even tried some bilateral breathing, sighting every 9 seemed fine.
Timing a lap is on the practice list for next time at the lake. I’ve been told that swimming in a wetsuit is faster than without, but haven’t seen any comparisons of pool and lake either with or without wetsuits. How do your times compare? Does using a wetsuit make up for the comparatively adverse conditions of open water?
Anyway, I’ll be sticking with the suit for now and I’ll let you know how my lake swims compare with pool times.
The pack came this week – and I really did enter the 2 mile swim! Eek!
just Trying to Swim...and Run... 