“If you’re gonna keep up this sort of work rate you gotta start eatin’ properly, girl! Then maybe you won’t feel so damn tired.”

I have to go swimming.

It’s Baltic out there! ‘Tepid’, as Frood would describe it. And raining. And windy. I’ll probably get just as wet walking to the pool as I will in it.

My weekly Grist email dropped into my inbox just now and pointed me towards the news that the American EPA is considering delisting lead as an air pollutant.

Yes, folks. That’s right. Delisting lead. The justification for this is apparently that past legislation has greatly reduced levels of lead in the air. So…

Yeah. OK. So because past legislation was effective, they’re proposing dropping it. This is the sort of logic I’d expect from Milkman Dan.

“Well, you see Karen, we don’t need that pesky law to protect little girls like you from nasty lead any more because there’s so little of it left. So we’ll just delete lead from the criteria pollutants the way the battery industry wants us to, especially as they asked so nicely, and let them pump that toxic metal into the air to their heart’s content. Now we know that blood lead levels as low as 10 micrograms per deciliter can impair mental and physical development, but I think being a gibbering retarded midget would suit you, Karen.”

“I hate you Milkman Dan.”

So that’s the Kinghorn-Burntisland loop done. And, yes, it took me twice as long as it should have done, but the outward leg was uphill into a 30mph wind gusting to 40mph, and by gods I could feel it. Freezing rain to boot.

The weather really isn’t co-operating with my training schedule.

The good news as far as I’m concerned is that I don’t feel like I’d struggle to do a run now. I was due to do a bike-run brick today but the weather is nasty. It’s supposed to be worse tomorrow, but there’s a lull predicted first thing in the morning, so I’ll see if I can take advantage of that.

As I can do 1200m in the pool without any trouble, at a consistent 9mins/400m, still feeling fresh, I reckon I should probably manage to get round this tri course, even with its 1:10 climb. Put a few more runs in on Fingal before I strip off the salad to make him race fit — that’s right. I’m training on Fingal in full touring mode, so when I come to race day he’ll weigh half as much as he does now. Cunning. I think the technical term is hypergravity training, but that’s a complicated name for the simple technique of riding a bike that’s heavier than the one you plan racing.

Today was not a good day to find out his seat post has stuck again. I shall have to take him along to Mum and Dad’s tomorrow, where our tools are, dump half a gallon of WD40 round the clamp and see if I can unstick it. I need to drop 5mm to take into account the different pedals (don’t want to be hobbling through transition on Look cleats so I’ve put the Time ATACs on there). If I can’t unstick it all is not lost: my tri suit has much thinner padding anyway, and if the weather’s good I’ll be taking Peregrine.

He’s a demon ascender and those Pavé Veloflex stick like gecko feet.

Brrr. Cold now. The heating doesn’t come on for another three quarters of an hour.

And can someone tell me how I got the idea into my head that I need to get my weight below 60kg?

Have I seen this guy when in London? He looks familiar.

Fruitbooter vs messenger. Dudes. To a Leftfield soundtrack (Phat Planet from Rhythm and Stealth, if I’m not mistaken).

I have SO got to get trackstands down this year.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gr1VeQlPcc]

That I’m abso-bloody-lutely freezing. My jeans are still wet from the walk through slushy precipitation back from the pool, I can barely feel my fingers and the sky looks like something out of a James Herbert novel — dark, oppressive and badly written for the sake of including as many rats as possible.

Er. I think that simile went a bit far. I should have stuck with Clive Barker.

Do you fancy a trip up to Bonny Alba in late June? It’s just that I see from the Triathlon Scotland site that there’s a race just along a bit from Embra — the Gullane Beach Tri. It looks like they’ve dropped the sprint distance, so it would have to be the full Olympic. What was your training schedule?

Anyone else? Only problem is that it’s the week after our proposed coast to coast and it definitely clashes with the Exodus.

You could swim to the start from our front door!

It’s blowing a hooey, with intermittent showers of freezing rain. I will be going swimming and should really go out on my bike. Somehow the motivation for grinding through weather like this is lacking.

Every so often the sun comes out for thirty seconds, just to mock me. Damn you sun! I know your game! I’ve come across the likes of you before! Sitting up there in the sky like some great big fiery ball, coyly fluttering your eyelashes and waving demurely only to dash behind a raincloud at the first sign of anything other than passing disinterest. Don’t you think for one minute that I’m going to be fooled by your temporary charms or your false promises!

I know that dreich is more than just a matter of perspective: it’s a reason for Gore-Tex.

Did my first brick today. Wasn’t anything exciting or even an appropriate switch: ran to the pool, swam 500m, ran home again. It was more a test of kit than anything else, as I was in Run and Become yesterday for a sports bra I can wear under my tri suit and a pair of running tights. Needed to check it all felt okay. Also I’ve had about 1 hour of sleep in the last 24 hours. A very good friend of mine from Ireland has been staying this week and it was her last night. We don’t see each other nearly as often as we should do, and I think we were trying to squeeze every last drop of usable time out of what we had left. I was fit to drop after getting back from the airport, but we’re down to only three weeks and I’m starting to worry.

By gum. Carrying on another sport in wet swim gear might be fine in the summer, but in Fife, in winter, when it’s getting dark and you can feel the cold trying to rip off your scalp, it’s not pleasant.

Things to remember:

1. Socks on before tights, if it’s cold enough on race day to need the tights. Wet legs are hard enough without wet feet;
2. Figure out how the hell to dive into the water without goggles being knocked back and filling up with water, thus necessitating a stop at the end of the first length to empty and adjust them;
3. Get a hat for running;
4. At this stage, 400m is really a piece of cake and it’s time to stop worrying about the swim time because 08:45 is a perfectly respectable time for a first triathlon;
5. The Fleming competitive streak really is a monster of epic proportions and should be muzzled and sent to Dog Borstal.

I hear the washing up calling me. Groan.

Need. More. Coffee.

On the On-One site.

Yeah, okay, so I emailed Brant and told him about the page because it’s me wittering on about my Pompino again. Then he told me about the new Lincolnshire Poacher project, the rotten tease. I can feel myself going weak and wobbly over the idea of a retro Pompino.

I wonder what he’d say if he knew that at one point I’d considered getting the On-One logo as my fourth tattoo? Thankfully I managed to bring myself to a sharp halt on that one, on the grounds that it would be even sadder than having a Campag chainring print tattoo.

I’ve just registered a new domain. Girlsfixtoo.com doesn’t have anything on it yet, because I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. Possibly something in black and pink. If you’re a girl, you ride fixed and you’d like to tell the world about it, preferably with pictures, drop me a line at the usual place (avoiding the low-tech spam trap) and you might be able to help me decide what to do with it. If you’re a bloke and you have an important woman in your life you’d like to persuade to ride fixed, well, you’ve come to the right place.