The Splat Cooking Blog

I thought that running a marathon was hard, I was wrong, it’s dead easy compared with triathlon training. I know a lot of it is down to the face that I only started learning how to do front crawl a few weeks ago. The more people I speak to the more I realise that this is an age thing. All my mates of the same age learnt to do breaststroke and weren’t taught crawl at school, it was referred to as freestyle then and not really bothered with and hardly anyone learnt how to breathe properly either. i was always really good a backstroke because that way I didn’t have to get my face under the water.

Anyway, after two lessons from my mate Kate I managed to overcome my fear of getting water around my nose. It was really hard, first lesson standing in her pool in waist deep water and Kate telling me to put my face under water and blow bubbles out of my nose – I instantly reverted to being 5 years old and wanting my Mum. This was daft, I scuba dive, I’ve gone down to 42m and I’m an Advanced Open Water Diver but I’m still scared of getting water up my nose – how pathetic is that?

I’ve always watched the people in the swimming pool ploughing up and down doing front crawl with envy, wishing I could do that, well, after a number of weeks practice and with the help of a Pool Buoy – not boy – I would have preferred the help of a 6′4″ blonde adonis but what I got was a funny, wiggly float, not quite the same! I CAN DO IT – I can do front crawl, and breathe through my nose and mouth, not using a nose clip an even better I can do it without drowning.

I have managed 400m in 10 minutes, which I think is slow but it’s a heck of a lot better than 6 weeks ago.

The other ‘interesting’ thing is the transition from cycling to running. Ooooh that feels really odd. the only way I can describe it is imagine you are running and when your feet hit the ground they feel like they are hitting the ground about a foot underneath the ground, really wierd. Two and half weeks to go – hmmmmm – what time do I want to do it in? I don’t care, I just want to do it and survive, preferably not come in last too.

Ooooh, I do love this job. I’m making ice cream with reception at cooking club this afternoon and made up the vanilla custard this morning. Quite amazed that for once I didn’t curdle the custard which is my usual habit as I end up doing a dozen things at once, when my eldest daughter makes it it never curdles – very annoying! Anyway, with four egg whites left over I decided to use them up by making double chocolate chip meringues so I can kid myself that there is very little fat in them therefore there are very little calories (yeah right, tonnes of sugar!) Got a bit carried away and threw in some finely chopped red chilli pepper in half of the batch and ground up some cardamom seeds for the other half.

Oooooh, lovely, Alison and i had to try them, and they are really yummy, fortunately they are over in the house and it’s raining so can’t motivate myself to go over and eat more which is much better for the bikini programme too (4 weeks to go, I refuse to accept that I’m too old to wear one even though Alison told me last week to get real and buy a sarong!)

Chilli or cardamom chocolate meringues are heavenly, I’ll send out the recipe in a newsletter this week so keep watching.