Having spent a lovely long weekend in Amsterdam our flight to Billund is delayed. Neither of us are particularly good air travellers and hanging around Schipol for an extra half hour doesn't help either of us to destress. Fortunately the flight is really short and the pilot makes up most of the time in the air so we land almost on schedule.
Bag unloading takes a while, to the point where about a third of the passengers were left at the luggage conveyor 10 minutes after everyone else had left the airport. We were discussing whether to go to the baggage office and start filling in forms to get our luggage delivered when it arrived on the next flight when the belts came back to life and the remaining bags arrived.
We picked up our hire car, a shiny silver Renault Captur that had just been delivered that morning and had only 25km on the clock from new and headed off to our hotel. It was a bit flash.
The photo is a poor representation of quite how awesome the hotel was.
Also Mrs M makes her first appearance in a blog photo.
Wednesday 11th
Registration and recce day. We lazed about in the morning before heading over to the court around lunchtime. Because of the late change of venue, registration was over an hour from the course. The GB team management kindly sorted this for us by collecting registration packs in advance and taking them to the race venue for anyone that wasn't staying near the course. This had an added benefit that we all had to check-in with the team management so we got to meet more of the team and the support crew than normal.
Here is a better photo of Mrs M doing her supporting job on recce day.
After collecting and checking my pack it was in to the water for a recce of the swim course. Most people got in to about mid-shin depth before we all stopped to have a chat. The core subjects being, "how much do you know about jellyfish?", "are those the dangerously stingy kind?", "should we all just go home instead?".
This is an actual photo from the marina wall.
For non-jellyfish experts (like me), the big ones are balloon-sized and are called moon jellies. No problem with them, you can just bat them out of the way. It is just like trying to push a volleyball under the water.
The little ones with the reddish-orange centres are another matter. They are juvenile lions mane jellyfish and are basically like having a bouquet of nettles slapped against you.
Fortunately, during the recce there were very few of the little ones, and once you have punched a couple of the larger ones the fear of them eases and swimming through a soup of them doesn't seem so bad. There were even some jokes going around after the recce swim about grabbing a couple of the moon jellies and using them as hand-paddles on race day.
After the recce we headed over to the race briefing and the team photo. We also bumped into a relative of Mrs M who had also qualified, but was in a different age-group so I wouldn't have to race him.
The briefing was fairly standard, until the race medic did his bit. He gave us a few tips on prevention and relief of jellyfish stings before pointing out that anything other than heat-packs to breakdown the barbs, shaving to remove the top layer of skin and hopefully the barbs and a handful of anti-histamines for any allergic reaction was "not evidence based" but you should feel free to try whatever works for you. This got the expected titter from 500 grown-ups who have watched too many episodes of Friends.
We then headed back to our hotel where we had a quiet night in watching the World Cup semi-final.
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