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This swim is the first of a series of things I'm doing this summer.  Apparently Loch Ness is beautifully warm at this time of year, sometimes even reaching double figures centigrade, while the risk of being devoured by a passing mythological water creature is greatly reduced if you're ahead of the slower half of the group.  As it's local to Inverness, I thought it would be good to sponsor the Highland Hospice in Inverness, which does amazing work, both for those approaching the end and for their families.

The swim took place on Saturday 17th August and was quite an experience.  Although the day started off quite calm, the promised wind duly got going stronger than forecast, so by the time the swim started the swell was a good two feet and two of the course marker buoys had blown off.   Once they had had been recaptured and put back in their place, the race was on with a mass-start of at least two hundred swimmers, which brought back memories of a bygone age when I used to play a bit of water polo.  For those of us doing a mile, the swim involved two laps of a triangular course.  I had just finished the fourth leg of the triangle, which was the second of two legs directly into the waves (by which time the swell was around three feet and pretty unpleasant) and was looking forward to swimming a leg across the wind and a final leg with the waves more or less at my back when the organisers called off the swim and ordered us all back to shore.  I'm unsure whether this was because of the conditions or because one of the marker buoys had escaped again, or both.  In any event, this means that I completed 5/6 of a mile rather than the full distance.  I shall try again next year and hope that the weather is better.  The water itself was quite a pleasant temperature and tasted lovely (I sampled quite a lot of it when swimming into the wind, so I know) and had the wind not been so bad, it might even have been enjoyable!

Technically, I didn't complete the mile, so if anyone thinks they didn't get value from my swimming, I hope they'll content themselves with the thought of all the shoe leather I'll be wearing out over the next month, as I'm now focusing on dry land, with the Pentland Push coming up fast.  Training starts in earnest next weekend, with a target of five munros in two days.

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