Posts Tagged ‘beach’

It has been a few years since our last group trip. Venla did come to Anglesey, but only in utero. As such, we were long overdue for a getaway. I fancied doing IRONMAN 70.3 Weymouth, so it seemed like an excellent opportunity to combine the two.

Our accommodation was a The Bakehouse, ideally situated near the pavilion with the beach one hundred metres away on one side and the quay even closer on the other.

The weather was sunny for the first few days, and we hit the beach several times. We walked up to Nothe Fort and explored the museum.

Saturday included Weymouth parkrun, and a BBQ and Sunday was taken up by IRONMAN 70.3 Weymouth. The second half of the week was rather wetter. It rained throughout the race.
As a result, on Sunday, we headed to the Sealife Centre. This seemed like a nice, dry, inside activity. But not in Weymouth. Most of their exhibits were outside, including the penguins, seals and Venla’s personal favourite: the scary duck. We were rather glad to get home and dry.

Most of all, though, we just hung out. It was a great opportunity to spend a week with friends.

A sea swim? Closed roads? Draft legal? Who could say no?!? Cat, Greg, myself and nearly 200 other athletes could not.

Pre-race

Thanks to Greg to booking ahead, we had an HPH table in the club zone. This was super useful for having somewhere to dump all of my stuff and go rooting through my bags. Luckily, there was no rain, but it was nice to have some indoor space anyway.

The swim

We walked down to the beach and had five minutes to wade into the sea and have a swim to warm up. After that, we waded back to the shore and lined up on the start line. When the whistle went, the fastest swimmers charged into the water while the rest of us waded in a little more slowly.

The water was choppy. As the waves came and went we bobbed up and down. I swallowed a lot of seawater. It was fun to be back in the sea at first, but the more I swam, the saltier my mouth became until it started to burn my throat.

Once we are out past the first buoy, we turned to swim parallel with the shore. This made it easier than swimming directly into the waves. In some ways, the waves made it easier to do front crawl than breaststroke, although you did get a sensation of falling when your hand came down into the water in front of you.

After the final buoy, I turned towards the shore. The waves pushed me forward but then seemed to drag me back. It felt frustrating and I had to use markers to test that I was still moving forward, which I was.

My total swim time was 22 minutes including getting off the beach. This is pretty typical for me; slightly slower because of the beach run and challenge of swimming in the sea.

Transition 1

The water became shallow a fair distance out and it made for a slow wade to the beach. We then ran up in it and into T1. I had brought a bottle of water to wash the sand off my feet before giving them a quick dry and throwing my bike shoes on.

The bike

The bike course was on closed roads, mostly along the seafront. It was also draft legal, although you could only draft with people of the same gender. The closest roads made for fun racing as you could go around a corner without worrying about oncoming traffic: although you did have to watch out for parked cars on some roads!

The first lap was lonely. As I am a slow swimmer, I was mostly on my own. At the second lap, I began to find people to draft. I assumed I had caught people up as we were quite well matched on the bike. I followed a couple of people’s wheels, although nobody ever seemed to follow mine.

At the end of the third lap, most of the athletes I was cycling with peeled off into T2. It turns out they were a lap ahead of me, which I was surprised at as they clearly could not out-bike me. This made for a lonely final lap. Drafting made it a lot easier and I was regularly doing 35 kph without too much effort.

There were supporters all around transition, and, at the far end of the course, a church group outside of their building. I decided to give them a wave on my final lap and got an extra loud cheer.

Transition 2

Nothing much to report here. I pulled my shoes and socks on and set off on the run.

The run

The run route took us along the promenade and back again, followed by a quick loop around the boating lake to complete the lap. There were three in total. I almost followed someone going the wrong way at the turnaround point but managed to correct just in time.

I saw Cat coming the other way, and Greg up ahead, almost I suspected (quite correctly) that he was a lap ahead of me.

As I came towards the last half of the final lap I could see that I wasn’t quite going to be able to squeeze it under 90 minutes, so I decided not to push too hard and enjoy it instead, walking across the line in celebration.

As I crossed the line, my sister and brother-in-law had turned up to cheer me on (I completely missed them) and Elina and Venla were also there (I completely missed them, too), but did see the rest of the Harriers cheering me on. What we can learn from this is that if you want to be seen, at a minimum, you need to be wearing a Harriers jersey.

The result

My overall time was:

1:30:27

And my splits were:

I am satisfied with those times. The swim was more like 22 minutes plus extra time to wade up the beach. And the run was pretty speedy given it was 5.5km.

Conclusion

I would highly recommend Redcar sprint triathlon. The sea swim adds an extra challenge and the closed roads make the bike section a lot of fun.

In May, we took Venla for her first trip to the beach.

She enjoyed herself. There were lots of new things to put in her mouth. Including pebbles. And sand. She ate lots of sand. In fact, the only thing that didn’t go in the mouth was the one thing you are supposed to eat: seaweed.

Flamborough often has it’s own weather system and it held out well for us: it was warm and sunny for most of the trip.

Hótel Búðir, spelt Hotel Budir in English, is a hotel located on the Snæfellsnes peninsula. It does not have a hot tub, or proper blinds for the windows, but what it lacks in these features it more than makes up for in location. Not to mention the friendly staff, excellent food and lovely decor.

You could definitely have a worse view. The other window, and the bathroom, look out across the Snæfellsjökull glacier.

The hotel seems to have a bit of a rock and roll attitude. Some of the rooms only seem accessible by crossing the roof. This is definitely worth a visit even if you are not in one of those rooms, simply for the panoramic view.

Their restaurant is busy, but the food is tasty, beautifully presented and comes in reasonable-sized portions.

Just up above the hotel is Búðir church. It has been re-built several times since the original.

Beyond the church is the ocean, and a surprising amount of sandy beach.

Without a doubt, Hótel Búðir offered us the most beautiful location of the trip. Mountains, a glacier, a waterfall and the ocean, all visible from the same room.

For the first half of our wedding we travelled to Finland. I do me “we”! All together we took a contingent of 17 people there. Elina and I flew out in advance to spend some time in Helsinki.

We stopped by Stadi Talkers Toastmasters club and then checked into Hotel Haven. Haven is my favourite hotel in the world. However, Helsinki is the only place we stay in a luxury hotel, so there isn’t really any competition. But it is really nice. I couldn’t blag us a suite for the wedding, but they did give us a celebratory box of chocolates!

Moomintroll looked very pleased to be back.

We then headed off to have dinner. The first time we were in Helsinki we had seen Ravintola Nokka but decided it was too expensive. This time, we were here for our wedding though, so decided to splash out. It was awesome. The best food I have had in Finland.

Below is a panorama from our dockside meal.

On Tuesday we visited Helsinki Zoo who had elk this time, and in the evening meet up with my family for a steak at Goodwin. We spent the day with them on Wednesday when we visited the island of Suomenlinna.

On Thursday we set off on our own again to visit Moominworld, before having lunch on a riverboat in Turku and meeting Elina’s mum for dinner in the evening. We even had time to stop by the yarn shop.

Then on Friday, we headed up to Pori to spend a day on the sandy beach up there, before having a late lunch in the town.

James took this photo of the beach.

Saturday was the big day itself. I will write that up separately.

We spent Sunday touring the lakes around Laitila, going for a dip in two of them and making use of the beach sauna too. Trouble was ahead when Norman managed to lose his glasses in the lake, but Dr Barr came to the rescue by managing to dive down and find them – and they laughed when I said I would go fetch the PhDs…

Helsinki was good, but relaxing over in the west was one of the best parts of the trip. We’re already eyeing up summer cottages for when Worfolk Limited makes its IPO.

Photos from our trip to Jersey.

We decided to take advantage of the long weekend by heading over to the beach. Flamborough seemed like a suitable choice because, given we’re in the UK, it seems a bit silly to go to a sandy beach to do some sunbathing when all you will get is wind and cold.

The drive over wasn’t too bad – most people seemed to be heading home from the weekend, so most of the traffic was going the other way. We got some sun in the morning but unfortunately, the tide times had changed quite a lot since I checked them a few days before, which I didn’t account for, so we arrived at exactly high tide.

Never the less, after a walk round the headland and some lunch we got down to the beach where we found a seal in one of the corners. Afterward we walked back round the headline, which was a good chance to get some photos.

Lachlan having sent us over a picture of himself on the beach in Melbourne where they are currently enjoying 42 degree days we decided to enlighten him on the sudden heatwave that had hit the UK causing us to head off to the beach on Monday. A quick snaps and non involvement of Photoshop later and the email was on it’s way. You can’t tell by the pixels or anything…

Props to Vince for touching up everything slightly given the time constraints we were working under.