Binge a Journey to the Dark Side

It may, or more likely, it may not, have come to your attention, that the Bingeswimmer has been dark for a while, (well almost 14 months if you’ve been counting). For the few of you who care, I can confirm that she is still alive and kicking (although her kick remains absolutely pants) and is full of good intentions to initiate a comeback in the water and also regularly blogging. Now before I get into the standard whinge and moan about how painful and brutal our sport can be, I thought I’d catch you up since December 2017.

Perhaps the most notable thing which happened in Binge World 2018 was that she migrated to a different club… joining Newcastle Swim Team. Big deal you may think, well for a Gateshead girl I can tell you it’s simply massive. On a par with Vader’s transformation from Jedi Master to Sith Lord, or the Terminator showing up to protect John Connor in Terminator 2, or closer to home Lee Clark turning out for the Mackems!

On the swimming front 2018 was the usual Binge fiasco, starting full of good intentions, but sadly this defection didn’t have the desired results as she probably made less than 20 sessions with them, (not a great return on the 55 quid a month training fees!)

There was also, somewhat predictably, the annual Binge swimming hiatus which this time ran from the Nationals in October until the annual January trip to Lanzarote.

But we’re now 6 weeks into 2019; New Year, New Age Group, New Ambitions, as the clock ticked past midnight on the 31st December Binge entered the 60 – 64 years age group. Yikes that’s 35 years of this lark. How did that happen?

So what’s in store for this year? well apart from the usual general intention to try and recapture some level of fitness, on the horizon is the prospect of a trip to the World Masters in South Korea.

I can’t say that there’s any detailed plan in place here, but I’ve booked a flight and started back in the water.

Regular readers of these ramblings will be astute enough to realise that it’s February, so Binge is currently enduring the madness of the February Fitness Challenge. (see here). You might also be relieved to realise that this blog starts more than half way through.

For the unaquainted, her aim is to firstly swim every day, yes you read that right, and secondly to try and cover 100,000 yds in the month. The latter is proving to be a bit of a bigger challenge not helped by Durham Tri session being cancelled today because of a gala, so I was forced to improvise in the public session at Consett this morning. A rather unimaginative 2.5k

• Saturday 16th February
• 400 warm up 100 swim, 50 drill, 100 swim
• 500 free pull @ 30 s RI
• 400 free pull @ 30 s RI
• 300 free pull @ 30 s RI
• 200 free pull @ 30 s RI
• 100 free pull @ 30 s RI
• 100 mixed
• 4 x 50 @ 1 min
• 200 swim down
• 100 best kick
• 2500 metres