Unlike the last couple of weeks when it has been quite busy, I arrived at the pool today to find no-one lane-swimming and it remained that way for most of my session. I have to admit that I wasn’t really feeling too keen to swim – my daughter has a cold and I think she may have passed it on to me, and for some reason I felt quite tired, too. I didn’t swim yesterday however because work got in the way and I don’t want to get into the habit of skipping two days in a row.
So, same set as last Friday, with a goal to make at least twenty-two reps before my first failure. In the end, twenty-two was exactly what I made, though the last one was a bit of a fight. From there, finishing the set without an additional failure wasn’t exactly a struggle 🙂
USRPT distance this year: 70,800m Total distance this year: 72,650m
Today started out a bit cloudy, but generally sunny and warm. Pretty much t-shirt weather, in fact, had the wind been a little less gusty. Obviously therefore it was time to get some outside jobs done. Unfortunately heavy rain has now stopped play (I’m still drying off).
First I decided to open up the observatory roof a bit and have a bit of a tidy up in daylight as doing the warm room insulation has made a bit of a mess.
I discovered that my temporary bodge to prevent rain running back along the roof rails has not held up and there was a small patch of damp on the floor. There was still water sitting under the rail, so clearly sorting that properly must be a priority as soon as everything gets dried out. It is at least the first time it has happened since I attempted to plug the gap temporarily.
Being able to roll the roof off and having a floor meant I could get to the southern gable comfortably with a step ladder, so getting the cladding on seemed like a good plan. That all went rather neatly and just as I was fixing the last piece in place, the first few raindrops started to fall from what actually looked to be a largely cloud-free sky. Discretion being the better part of valour I decided to close up the roof and finish off the cladding on the top of the southern wall where the flap folds down. The bottom length of cladding on the flap has a layer of EPDM trapped under that covers the join between the flap and wall. I trimmed that to size and then trapped the bottom section behind the top piece of cladding as I nailed it in place. As I was nailing the last piece on the rain started pouring down, so I finished off and paused only long enough to take another photo on my way back to the house.
I’m not quite done with that end yet, but I decided to leave the “skirt” of membrane in place until I can fix some sort of drip bar in place to protect the gap between the gable and flap.
So, my next jobs to do are sort out that drip bar, fix the leak and make a door. I was getting very near the end of my box of stainless nails, which I’ll need for cladding the door, but another very kind observatory-builder has offered to send me his left-overs. That should cover everything I need, I think.
Weather that started merely unpleasant turned to completely horrible throughout the course of the day, so whilst keeping an eye on the rugby I’ve been finishing off insulating the outside walls of the warm room. The additional insulation I needed arrived earlier this week and I’ve been doing a few pieces between finishing work and darkness falling in the evenings when it was possible, but today I was determined to get through the rest of it.
To insulate the internal wall I need to clad one side first, but I haven’t ordered the ply for cladding the walls yet. And before I can fix it I need to adjust the window height (and make the opening the correct size) and also make sure rain can’t run back along the roof rails into the scope room, so those are probably the next two jobs. I really do need to think about making a proper door soon, too.
I really could do with an improvement in the weather soon. We’ve had winds gusting up to 45-50mph pretty much without a break for the last ten days or so now and that’s no time for working with the roof open or mucking about with lengths of cladding 🙁
I arrived at the pool slightly early today to find it already empty. Normally there’s a school session, but apparently the last one hadn’t turned up so I started ten minutes early with the pool to myself. I did have to share it with a few people, including one parent who repeatedly dragged her baby across my lane whilst encouraging it to kick, but what can you do?
I felt slow today, but by the clock I was doing ok and in the end had my first and only failure on rep twenty-two, a couple more than yesterday and back to where I was on 7th March. Afterwards I did a bit of tumble turn practice in the shallow end. I struggle to avoid hitting the bottom on turns at the shallow end, but I’m getting there slowly.
USRPT distance this year: 69,050m Total distance this year: 70,900m
Feels like I’ve been swimming this set for a long time, now. Hopefully improvements will continue and I can kill it off and move on soon. It was much quieter at the pool today so much easier to swim, though I did have to politely ask one swimmer who was managing to swim diagonally between the ends of two lane lines if they wouldn’t mind sticking to just the one…
Anyhow, the set was quiet tough, but I did just manage to make nineteen reps before my first and only fail. That being one more than in the previous session I was happy enough with it and hope the good news will continue tomorrow.
USRPT distance this year: 67,300m Total distance this year: 69,100m
The pool was quite busy today. I had to persuade a couple of pensioners that they’d really be better off the “slow” lane instead of trying to share the only other lane available with myself and another swimmer going about twice as fast as they were. They weren’t best pleased, but common sense prevailed in the end.
I don’t usually swim that well when the pool is crowded because the water becomes very choppy and I didn’t sleep at all well last night, but I can’t really complain about today’s performance, particularly after yesterday’s disaster. I managed eighteen reps before failing just the once on nineteen, though I was a little late setting off on a couple as a result of trying to avoid the other swimmer in the lane. That messed up my next rest interval a bit which in turn made the following rep somewhat harder. Still, I’ve got no complaints given the improvement.
Hopefully I can now continue to improve and we’ll just gloss over Monday’s performance 🙂
USRPT distance this year: 65,550m Total distance this year: 67,350m
I was back at the pool today with some hope of completing my current set. It soon became painfully obvious however that it just wasn’t going to happen. Right from the start I was struggling. No idea why. I was working very hard, but just couldn’t recover fast enough. Perhaps I didn’t get enough sleep or maybe I’m getting a mild cold or something, but whatever it is my performance was certainly not up to last week’s standard.
In the end I failed on rep twelve and then again on rep eighteen, making it to the end of the set in very ragged fashion. Hopefully things will be better tomorrow.
USRPT distance this year: 63,800m Total distance this year: 65,600m
Last swim of the week and I was determined to do one more rep than yesterday. I did manage to do just that, but towards the end things were getting quite ragged. These last few reps are proving quite difficult to get through.
Be nice to finish off this set next week if I can though.
USRPT distance this year: 62,100m Total distance this year: 63,900m
It’s been another unpleasant weekend weather-wise (pretty much for everyone in the UK and Ireland by the looks of the news), but I eventually forced myself to get outside and do a little work on the observatory.
The first job was to finish off the warm room floor around the cable trunking. Unfortunately that meant removing my temporary power supply (I had an extension lead running up through the gap). When the weather is a little more pleasant I’ll work out another way to do it. I also managed to get caught outside in a sudden hailstorm, which wasn’t pleasant
After that I used up all the remains of the insulation I have, fitting it in the warm room walls. The builder’s merchant was supposed to deliver some more last week, but they didn’t turn up. I’ll have to enquire about it tomorrow. I’d only piggy-backed it on an order for some other jobs because fitting the insulation is a nice simple inside job that doesn’t require lots of wandering back and forth between the observatory and workshop.
Finally during a break in the cloud I dropped the end flap down and trimmed a little off one corner where it was binding on the roof rails, which means it now closes much more neatly.
That’s two more jobs ticked off the list which is good news.
Doesn’t look like there’s much of a let-up in the weather this week other than for a few hours of sunshine tomorrow, so I’ll try to get outside then and re-route the extension cable to allow me to do things inside in the evenings. I’ve got a lot of jobs backing up that need at least half-reasonable weather though. I need to be able to get on with those at some point soon.
Another repetition of my current set. I felt very sluggish when warming up today. Not that I was particularly tired, but it just felt as though I was swimming through treacle 🙁
It didn’t seem to affect my performance too badly though. This time I managed twenty-one reps before failing on twenty-two and then the last two were a doddle to finish off.
Given a refreshing night’s sleep there’s a chance that I could complete the entire set tomorrow. If I can make twenty-two reps then I’d really feel I needed to push myself just to make two more. At which point I’d have to have a rethink of my current strategy and change the focus of my sets slightly I think. But that’s for another day 🙂
USRPT distance this year: 60,350m Total distance this year: 62,150m
