Drumming

Snare drum, gleaming in the sunshine

With the move from Ironman training to mere marathon training, G finds that he has time on his hands these days to rediscover old hobbies.  Given how intolerant I am of his love of music which consists entirely of repetitive beats and no melody, it is perhaps a little surprising that I love listening to his drumming so much.  But I do.  As long as I have know him, he has been drumming.  He was a shocking 45 minutes late for our second date, but when he eventually showed up he had drum sticks poking out of his coat pocket and was full of enthusiasm for a new technique he'd just learned at his drum lesson - he was so engaging and interesting on the subject of drum beats that I forgave his (happily uncharacteristic) tardiness and we went on to have a third date.

I think proper hobbies are the ones that you can't help but doing, and the ones which you return to again and again during your life.   G first had drum lessons as a teenager, and when we first moved in together, in our early twenties, the drum kit came too and he played regularly. 

Moving the drums into our new flat in 1998

When the children were little there wasn't much spare time for drumming; we let them loose on the bongos, while the rest of the kit was packed away.

O, aged 2, with bongos

C, aged about 10 months, with bongos

But the love of drumming is always there for G, and can be slotted into family life surprisingly easily these days.  You don't need a full drum kit permanently set up in a spare (soundproofed) room to play the drums.  You can even enjoy your hobby of drumming whilst living in a terraced house in the middle of London - and we've even managed to stay friendly with the neighbours.  Like all good hobbies, there are plenty of opportunities to purchase drumming gadgets, and there is a wide array of gadgets to make drums quieter and less invasive.

There are practise pads to hit instead of drums - I find these particularly lovely to listen to, as they give off a gentle tippety-tap sound.

Snare drumming in the sunshine

There's also some beautiful blue gel which can be stuck onto the drum skin to lessen the resonance and calm things down a little.

G just has his snare drum out these days - but you can learn and perfect almost all the basic drum techniques you will ever need with just a snare drum, a couple of sticks and some quality practise time.  G has some wonderful snare technique books, from the 1930s to the 1950s, which he is working through. 

Progressive Syncopation - first published 1958

Stick Control - first published 1935

Advanced Techniques - first published 1948

I find the names of the different drum patterns he practises enchanting, and delightfully onomatopeic: paradiddles, flams, ratamacues, rolls (and then there are flamadiddles, rolls into ratamacues and all sorts of other tongue-twisting combinations).

It is the soundtrack of our weekends these days, and I find it very soothing to hear the syncopated taps and rattles coming from our bedroom or the sitting room as I potter around the house keeping busy in my own way - cooking or reading or knitting.

Race weekend

The race weekend begins on Saturday when we drive up to the National Water Sports Centre in Nottingham with a car full of kit.  The children are staying with their grandparents for the weekend, which means that the race bike doesn't have to suffer the indignity of travelling on a bike rack, it can sit on its very own blanket in the back of the car.

The gleamingly clean bike (in bits) on its special yellow blanket in the back of the car

The day before race day

There are three important things G has to do on the day before race day: registration, racking and race briefing.

Registration takes place in the main building at the National Water Sports Centre.  Most people, including G, are wearing club sweatshirts.  The lady at the registration desk knows G's swimming coach and makes a special fuss of him because he is the only competitor from his club, East London Triathletes.

At Registration

The nice registration lady gives G his race number, which he will wear on a belt around his waist all through the race.  He is also given his timing chip which he will wear on a strap around his ankle all through the race.  The timing chip records his finish time as well as his times for each separate discipline and at various other points around the course.

His race number, which he wears all through the race.  It has his name too, so people can cheer him on!

Once registration is done, we go back to the car and G gets everything ready for racking.  Racking means leaving the bike in the bike racks ready for the race the next day, and also leaving the bike kit (helmet, bike jacket, socks and special clippy bike shoes) in the Bike Transition. 

Transition is where you switch from one discipline to the next.  In Bike Transition you peel off your wetsuit (you will be wearing a tri-suit underneath), and swimming hat, put on your bike kit and load your pockets and your bike with snickers bars and water bottles.  In Run Transition you take off your bike kit and put on your running kit (a new pair of socks and your running shoes - still wearing your tri-suit).

Getting ready for racking, G has to be very organised and concentrate to make sure he is leaving everything he needs in the correct place.  Triathlons are complicated!  Luckily G is a very organised person, so this bit is trouble free.

The back of our car, full of kit being prepared for racking.

We take the bike to the bike racks and G is pleased that the slot for his bike is easy to remember - at one end of the second row.  He won't be dithering in Bike Transition looking for it amongst the hundreds of others.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of bicycle in the bike racks. Early in the afternoon - the racks filled up much more as the day went on.

He leaves a labelled bag with his bike kit in at the Bike Transition, and another labelled bag with his running kit in at the Run Transition.

Then G heads back into the main building for an hour long race briefing.  He finds out important things like what time he has to be in the water ready to start the swim (5:50am) and what will be available at the feeding stations on the run course (bananas and water).

I stand on the balcony of the main building, admiring the view of the lake (usually used for rowing races) and wondering how far the swim actually is.  When G comes out of his race briefing I ask him.

We leave the Water Sports Centre and drive into Nottingham to check in at our hotel and get everything ready for a very early start the next day.

Everything he needs for race day, laid out on the hotel floor the night before

Race day

We set our alarms for 3:30 am.  G gets up and makes himself breakfast: muesli, wholemeal bagels with peanut butter, and fruit smoothies.  I make a pot of coffee and put it in a flask for later.  At 4:15 we leave the hotel and set off for the Water Sports Centre.  We are there in plenty of time, and G goes to the bike racks to check that everything he needs is in the right places at Transition, and to pump up the tyres on his bike.

The sky was dark and the moon still up when we got to the Water Sports Centre at 4:45am

We go into the main building and while I sip my flask of coffee he inches his way into his wetsuit.  Swimming wetsuits are made quite differently to surfing or diving wetsuits.  They are eye-wateringly tight, and take a good ten minutes to put on.  I watch everyone else wriggling into theirs, and rubbing vaseline around their wrists and ankles to stop any chafing.  Seeing hundreds of men peel themselves into skin-tight wetsuits is a bit much at this time in the morning, actually.  I sip some more coffee and avert my gaze.  Wives are applying suncream to husbands' ears and necks, and I put some on G too.

We head down to the lake and I say goodbye to G before he heads into the competitors' area and lines up at the edge of the lake.  I am suddenly utterly overwhelmed by the enormity of what he has to do, and burst into tears, but he is grinning his very widest grin and looks ready to take on the world.

And he's gone. Spectators outside the competitors' area at 5:40am, just after I said goodbye to G

The start of the race

The race is a 2.4 mile swim, followed by a 112 mile bike ride, followed by a 26.2 mile (marathon distance) run.  He is hoping to do the whole race in twelve and a half hours.

I next see him early in the afternoon, about a quarter of the way into his run.  I stand on the grassy bank with loads of other supporters and shriek madly when I see him running towards me.  He is pleased to see me, is still beaming, and high fives me as he runs past.  The next time I see him, about an hour and twenty minutes later he is still looking good, although the grin has faded a little.  He has one more lap to go.  I move closer to the finish line and start to get very excited and nervous.  He is nearly home, and it looks like he is going to be much faster than he expected.

I finally see him coming into the home straight at 12 hours and 3 minutes - a full half hour faster than he expected.  The grin is back and I shriek with excitement again and shout to the world how wonderful he is.

He did it!

I push my way through the crowds and press myself against the railings separating the spectators from the finished competitors.  We have lots of sweaty kisses and he disappears into a marquee to collect his medal and eat some pasta.

Later still, he retrieves his bike, wetsuit and other kit and comes through to the spectators side wearing his new t-shirt, his medal...and that big grin!

His brother and sister were also there to support him and we all tell him how amazing he is and how very, very proud of him we are.  Tears are shed (mostly by me) and dozens of photos are taken.  It has been an amazing weekend, which we will all remember for the rest of our lives.

G, with his incredibly proud brother and sister

~~~~~~~~~~

The race, though, is just one day. 

The training for this race has been a full year of complete dedication and focus on G's part (on top of seven previous years of competing in the usual shorter-distance triathlons), as well as sacrifice, compromise, thoughtfulness and determination.  It is for these qualities that he gets my admiration and pride.  He has truly been an inspiration to me.  Nothing with value comes without hard work, and the race day is a celebration and illustration of all that hard work.

The rhythm of the week ~ Sunday

Sundays begin on Saturday evenings these days. 

The race bike comes down from its bed of blankets in the loft and is loaded with snickers bars and sports gels ready for a 6am start on Sunday morning.

With just four weeks until his ironman race, G is at absolute peak fitness and spends his Sundays out on a 6 or 7 hour bike ride followed immediately by an hour's run.  I am in awe that anyone can do this amount of exercise and still vaguely function at the end of it.

He comes back with odd tan marks (from cycling gloves paired with a sleeveless tri-suit), and sits contentedly in the garden, soaking up the evening sunshine and telling me how fast he cycled (very fast). 

We're missing him while he's doing all this training, but so proud of him for all his hard work and dedication.  Only four weeks left.

Treasure hunt

There is a new toy in my handbag these days.


It clashes a bit doesn't it?



It is my hand-held GPS and I use it for my new hobby of geocaching. A month or two ago I read this article in The Guardian which left me desperate to find out more.

Geocaching is a world wide treasure hunt. People hide boxes, or caches as they are called - some big, some ridiculously tiny and many in between - then post the co-ordinates of where the cache is hidden on the geocaching website. Anyone who wants to find a cache then goes onto the website, downloads the co-ordinates for where it is hidden onto their GPS and sets off in search of treasure.

Each cache will contain a log book, and sometimes some small pieces of treasure. When you find the cache you sign the log book and then once you get back home, you register your find on the website. If you want you can take a piece of treasure and leave something else in its place.

When I first looked into geocaching I wondered if anyone else in East London knew about it. Turns out I am late to the party. Within 20 miles of my house there are 1,332 caches hidden! There are so many hidden near where I work in the City that I can even go hunting in my lunch hour. Here are pictures from today's hunt, which took a little over 15 minutes in total - from leaving the office to getting back to my desk.

My GPS tells me it is hidden in this un-promising looking side street:


Right by this piece of masonry. Can you see it?



Got it!


There are so many things I love about this mad new hobby:

• The sheer scale of it. Caches are everywhere. We went down to Lewes to see some friends this weekend, and in the park where we had a picnic lunch, there was a cache. There are even half a dozen hidden within 30 minutes drive of my parents house in darkest middle-of-nowhere rural France.
• The subterfuge involved in finding caches. Its important not to give away a cache location to the non-geocaching public. If you see someone in the street pretending to make a phone call, or dropping their keys suddenly, they are probably surreptitiously retrieving a cache.
• The surprise of discovering what treasure people have left in the cache.
• The way it makes even the most mundane of walks or lunch hour strolls into something more exciting and adventurous.

If you want to give it a go, you may not need to buy yourself a shiny new yellow toy for your handbag (because I know yellow is not everyone's colour). Many mobiles and PDAs have GPS capabilities, and if you have a sat nav kit in your car, you can use that. Some sports watches even have GPS.

.

So maybe now you want to find out more. Here are some good places to start:

• The geocaching website
• The geocaching flickr group
• This GPS guide book
• Even this crazy geocaching UK shop where you can buy these rather lovely geocaching dog bandanas. If you see a dog wearing one of these, there must be treasure nearby!

Happy hunting!