I'm so Tired, my Mind is on the Blink...

This week fatigue has caught up with me. It hasn’t just caught up with me, it has overtaken me in a massive way. Fatigue is in a Sebastian Vettel driven Red Bull Formula One car, and I am in my sellotaped up Citroen Saxo. I have swum 26km in the pool so far which has actually been fine, but when I return home I literally cannot stand up. I have been slurring my words and wobbling around the house like a drunk, it’s been very weird.

Every morning this week I have struggled to get up. It has taken me about 15 minutes to prise myself off of my bed, and a further 5 minutes to remove the pillow that has stuck solidly to my face with dribble. When I arrive at the pool I feel fine, after a few lengths. I worry about over training and I also worry about not training enough, it’s a horrible conundrum that I am yet to solve.

On Wednesday the decision to cut training short was taken out of my hands when I had to leave the pool for not being a woman. Now I am pretty sure when the Women’s rights movement was in full swing they wouldn’t have wished for everything to be equal, but still have time on their own in the pool. It does seem odd that on 2 days a week, I am potentially not allowed to finish my session because of my sex and age.

I know I have touched upon this subject before but it is annoying, why are there no men’s under 50’s hours? I’ll tell you why, because it would be sexist. The best solution, crazy as it may sound, is to let everybody swim all the time. I'm sure this would never work though.

I had this discussion with a friend recently who disagreed with me, saying that: “if women are embarrassed about swimming in front of people then let them have their hour” fair enough, but what happens when a bloke is embarrassed? There are plenty of blokes in the pool who should be embarrassed. The first time I squeezed into a pair of speedos I would have been pleased to see an empty pool, but no, I had to crack on.

I just feel that you shouldn’t pick and choose when you want to be equal, and when you want special treatment. I'm not saying that this is what has happened, as ironically of the people I have spoken to about this, the women have agreed and the men disagreed.

This subject of course wouldn’t bother me quite so much if I wasn’t training for such an epic swim, but I am, so every second in the pool is viewed as crucial. It’s incredibly frustrating to miss out on possibly essential training purely because of my genetic make up.

In other news the school holiday’s will shortly be upon us, this means the pool will once again become a battleground. Children will attempt to kill me at every turn, their parents will tell me how adorable they are, I will disagree but nod and smile. Please let me swim families, I’ll be very grateful.

Anyway I have 5 more weeks to push and am slowly becoming nervous, so things are bothering me a lot more. I’m also knackered so this is probably playing a part. Luckily I only have around 11 hours of sea swimming this weekend so that should be nice and easy…