I DID IT!

Cottesloe beach had an aura of un-reality with the pre-dawn light and floodlights - making the registration, waiting and starting process feel just a little weird.  My zen feelings had completely gone by the time I was near the start, getting my mum to rub anti-chafe cream on me while I struggled to put my suit on in time, getting more and more nervy all the time.

Even on the start line it just didn't quite feel like all these people wearing white caps were actually going to swim to Rottnest that day.  But at 5.45am we did just that.  The sun was rising behind us and it seemed like the conditions were, in fact, perfect.

The first 10km were fantastic!  I was buzzing, I was really positive, I felt great.  Every drink stop everyone would say ‘you’re doing great, you’re swimming strongly’ and I would tell them I was feeling great.  The food /drinks were working out really well, not too much, not too little - just enough!

Feeling zen...

...surprisingly zen. I thought I'd be a nervy, twitching, dishevelled mess by now!

I had imagined sitting on the couch, relaxing, chilling, visualising a successful Rottnest swim for at least part of today, but that didn’t happen.  I thought I was organised, but there was still shopping for fake carbo loaded food and organising to be done.  But I managed to keep my calm all day. 

The weather obsessing begins

Just five sleeps until the big day... and try as I might I can't stop myself from looking at weather websites. 

Love this synchronised swimming (a stolen photo from
last year's Rottnest Channel Swim)

Given:
a. the forecast has completely changed since this morning, and
b. that each website is saying something different

I should really know that five days away we aren't really going to know with any certainty what the weather on Saturday is going to be like.

We're buying a house!

So how about that! A beachy kind of house near the ocean and near the inlet in Denmark.

We didn't really mean to... we thought the smartest thing to do would be to move to Denmark, cash in hand, rent for a while and take our time to find the right place.

But this house ticks quite a few boxes - it is affordable (big tick), close to Ocean Beach (~3km away), cycling distance to town, on half an acre, lots of space for people to come stay with us, did I mention affordable?  Really, what took us so long to put the offer in?

On a less serious note

There is always swimming to think about!  I'm not thinking about much else right now.

The Rotto swim is 2 weeks away.. after so many months of training, preparation, obsessing, dreaming.

My sister asked me today 'do you ever think of the S-word?'

And mostly not. Although looking for images just now was a bit confronting.

It is the other S-word that causes most of the angst  - the common stinger.

I'm glad...

... that we weren't waiting for this particular cyclone. 

It has been some start to 2011 in Australia. After 2010 set all kinds of records for extreme weather events around the world.  The Russian heatwave, Pakistan floods - anyone seeing some kind of pattern here?

One of the world's biggest insurance companies Munich Re have! And they have:

built up a comprehensive natural catastrophe database, which shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled since 1980, and windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with particularly heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be explained without global warming. Worldwide, 2010 has been the warmest year since records began over 130 years ago.

Given this is an industry that is already directly impacted by climate change and have been really outspoken about it for years, I would expect they would be taken more seriously or to receive more attention.  But if someone publicly suggests that just maybe this greater frequency of extreme weather events is likely to be connected to climate change they are howled down for trying to politicise an event or generally ignored.

The standard answer seems to be "look back at history, we've always had floods/ droughts/ cyclones - this is just natural".  As though weather events resulting from climate change have to be something new that we've never experienced before?  People... climate change just exacerbates existing weather patterns, exacerbates the extremes... it doesn't create something entirely new!