Oh look, I haven’t met my two blog posts a month target – again – argh! Oh my, June has *flown* by. I’ve spent the month either in the lake (I am so lucky) or mixing glazes in the studio. It’s been totally full on. However, seeing as these blogs have had a lot of glazing already, let’s pick up the swimming for once.
I started this month by swimming the one mile course of the Ullswater Epic events series. Given I have a dread of mass starts and am generally a small group swimmer, this was a bit daunting. I was also worried that I might freeze, given how long it would take me to get around. However, I signed up with friends some months ago, the event definitely gave me focus in recent weeks, and on the day it was so hot I thought I might expire in my wetsuit before even getting in! I can’t say that swimming in a crowd is particularly pleasurable, but I did it, and I got around in a bit over 37mins which I don’t think is too bad – especially since I won’t do pool training. After being a bit anxious in the run up, I ended up having an absolutely lovely day with friends and brilliant picnic afterwards in hot sunshine.
Since then I’ve organised a tarn dip in Angle Tarn (lovely), done a windy Solstice swim with Suzanna Swims at Crummock and finally found the courage to join the swim training on a Tuesday night at Another Place, run by the quite incredible Colin Hill of Ullswater Swim Place. (He can not only swim the length of Ullswater, but also swim back again. It slightly boggles my mind.) Granted, there are some pretty serious swimmers there (which I am not), but Colin has set stuff up so well with a short and long course that I don’t feel I’m in the way and I can just focus on trying to improve what I do, which is lovely. It’s such a contrast to pool swimming which I find frankly really intimidating. Colin has given me some really useful tips and I do think that, with a bit more practice, I should start to improve. So if anyone else wants to join me in the amateur crowd bumbling around the short course slowly, I would definitely recommend it.
Tomorrow of course is 1 July, and only two weeks to Penrith show, and three and a half months to PotFest, so there needs to be a lot more glazing, and some fairly rapid glaze development as I start to move towards that. I’ve got a lot of ideas, but there is still much to tweak, so the next plan is (another) big spreadsheet with making and glaze testing lists as someone really does now need to get cracking!