Most disastrous swim ever

I must say that I have never had such a disastrous swim as what I had today.

I was in lane 2 which was pretty fair, so I took up the rear seeing as I hadn't been swimming. We did 8 x 100mtrs warm up and pretty much as soon as I started swimming the dreaded cramps came along. At first I thought that I could relax my legs and just swim through them with less kick effort, but they just got worse. So I grabbed a pool buoy and tried to relieve them by not kicking at all, this didn't help matters either. My toes were curling up, my arches were cramping, they were starting to go into my calves and the back of my heel - it was just awful.

In then end I went across to lane 1 as I was being lapped and getting in the way of the other guys in my lane. I kind of just tried swimming up and down the lane with my pool buoy, but the cramps persisted for the whole session. As a consequence I wasn't concentrating on my stroke, it felf as though I was just thrashing about trying to get from one end of the pool to the other...

Unfortunately, Mark decided that we were going to do team relays. So I was put into my team after much trouble getting out of the pool with my cramps and being told that we must all dive in. I dived in and immediately lost my goggles, so because I wear contact lenses I couldn't open my eyes underwater. Consequently, I was thrashing about with cramped feet and calves bouncing off the lane ropes because I couldn't see where I was going. I was so embarrassed I wanted the ground (or the water) to swallow me up whole.

It seems that whenever I swim of a night I get cramps. There has been a pattern with this as long as I can remember. In fact I remember being plucked out of the water one swim club night when I was about 15. So, I have made the decicision not to do night swimming and I will do Trent's lunchtime swimming and then the BTS Saturday lunchtime swims. Hopefully, this false start to the commencement of my swim training will just be a little blip on the radar and I will start to make some progress in the coming weeks...