25 April 2026 When I was mapping out my ambitious return to racing during my "dry days" in January and February, I found a perfect pair of bookend competitions to an "events as high quality workouts" period, with lineups as mirror-images: March 21st's Derbyshire Open Masters Championships April 25th's Bracknell-Wokingham Swim Club's National Qualifier meet Five weeks apart, both in a long course pool without a separate warmup/cool-down pool (for maximum lactate-joy), and both

18 April 2026 Just like last weekend , I lined up a full "Swimming Saturday" ... 3,200 meter morning Barnet Copthall masters team workout Gargantuan chicken caesar salad at the Silver Service Cafe for our team breakfast/brunch ... and then, starting from the end of the Northern Line at Mill Hill East, a tube, train and bus to head out to Swindon's Link Centre for an afternoon of racing This massive, if dated, facility has come to closest to reminding me of a Canadian commun

11 April 2026 I decided to really put my heart through its paces on Saturday, starting off with a 2,600 meter workout with my Masters team at the Barnet Copthall pool ... ... which featured a warmup set of 16 x 25 (where I started to ramp up the heart rate) before a main set of 9 x 100, 3 each on 1:35, 1:30, 1:25 where I held mostly 1:13/14s through the first six and then descended down to 1:08 on the last three. I then had enough time to have a great, if a bit abbreviated,

7 April 2026 After our (mis-)adventures in Madrid and with Canadian Masters Nationals a mere seven weeks away, today marked the start of a focused six-week training and one-week drop taper cycle to try to see if I can get back into any semblance of racing shape to at least be able to deliver a somewhat decent 200 freestyle result. I arrived at the London Aquatics Centre to brilliant sunshine and evidence that there was a lot of fun happening here over the Easter long weekend

5 April 2026 Bella and I have locked into our top five features for our travel perfection: Fitness first – pools for me and great gyms for her Food next – we aim to eat our way around locations, going in for local over global, flavour over fullness (though sometimes we indulge with filling local flavour!) Walk ing, walking, walking – we walk A LOT with history/city walking tours and food walking tours booked whenever possible. This both serves goal #1 and is the best wa

3 April 2026 While the swim/workout and the pool itself are the primary goals behind all of my pool tourism, a very close third place is the journey to and from the pool. Particularly when I'm in a new city, I view the travel as part of the challenge ... and the delight. It can also be humbling ... but in a growth-oriented way. We arrived into Madrid on Thursday late afternoon and I was smugly confident in my ability to navigate the Metro from the airport to our hotel. Mad