Tenerife Part 4

It's the last day in Tenerife, and whilst I'm a bit sad to be leaving the sun and the awesome outdoor swimming pool, and going back from having super coaching twice a day to swimming on my own, I have to say that it WILL be nice to get back to my own comfortable bed and Mr W on Saturday.

I hit a low spot on Wednesday afternoon, was absolutely shattered and got very cold on the swim. This lasted through to Thursday morning's swim and I felt quite miserable. In retrospect, although I'd been eating a huge amount, it probably wasn't quite enough to keep up with all of the extra exercise - things seem to have balanced out again now.

Thursday lunchtime saw a bit of a crisis when after skyping Mr W for half an hour, I logged on to check that all was well with my bank account - something I do every other day in the UK but hadn't since Saturday. all was NOT well, as there was a payment of £1100 to Admiral insurance, and a suspicious payment to O2. My car insurance is certainly not that expensive, is with Sheila's wheels, and is due in quite a different month. An anxious call to my bank, The Co-Operative, revealed that not only had these transacations taken place but there had been a lot of declined transactions from places that I'd not heard of. I should have realised that something was suspicious when I attempted to top up my phone with my debit card on Saturday and it was declined. The nice lady went through every transaction of the last month and then said that they would be able to refund the money, including that of the charges for being overdrawn quite so much, within 24 hours, and I'm happy to see that today the money is back. Very grateful that they were so helpful. Of course, I am also happy to prove Mr W wrong about taking cash abroad - if I didn't have some euro notes with my knickers in my suitcase, I would be a little bit stuffed now without my debit card (which has had to be cancelled).

After that I was quite worked up, which helped me overcome my lethargy of the last 24 hours and I was ready for a good swim in the 50m pool. After a warm up, the coach announced that we were going to do a "broken" version of our race distance - for me that is the 3.8km "ironman" swim. So, we wouild swim 4x400m (with 30 seconds rest between each one), 4x300m (20 seconds rest between), 4x200m (10 seconds rest), 4 x 50m (5 seconds rest). It was pretty intense, and I was pleased with myself for keeping up with another guy who is a seasoned ironman triathlete - in the event, I beat him by 7 seconds, and came in first out of the three of us doing that distance in 62 minutes 40 seconds (after the 4 mins 15 seconds of resting taken off). Am very pleased to achieve that at this point in the season - I still have a way to go to get round a 3.8k in under an hour but I'm making good progress.

This morning we had our last open water swim and we must have covered about 2km of swimming in the sea whilst the sun rose before a well deserved breakfast. I'm now back at the pool for our final swim in the 25m pool. Sadly, the bright blue skies of earlier have disappeared behind a cloud but I must make the most of the last session outside, won't be doing another one of those for a few months yet in the UK, although I understand that it's been quite warm the last few days?

Fly back at lunchtime tomorrow, so hope to be home in time for a late dinner with Mr W before I tackle the mountains of washing.