Happy Australia Day

Australia Day today so today I took part in the great Australian tradition of 'not being at work'.

Australia Day means a lot of different things to different people and I think most of them have different ways of marking the day, whether they see it as a day of celebration or not.

For our household Australia Day typically means a day to chill out and spend some time together. Today that was particularly true since we had the extended family over to our house for the day. As such the day was spent taking part in those time honoured Aussie activities of being down the beach and spending too much time in the sun. Lots of fun though.

Not all tickles and giggles though. Before people got here I took the chance to shimmy into the wetsuit and head down the river for a swim. Now I won't lie, this swim was partially motivated by me wanting to get a bit of activity, but also because this was the swim I was supposed to do way back on Saturday afternoon. I am not a big fan of trying to play catch up on training, do it or don't, just don't make excuses, is my usual philosophy. But this morning I saw the chance to make up for a missed session so I took it. Plus it was a lovely morning for a dip.

Usually when I swim in the river I do laps of Bicton Baths, which is a semi-enclosed 50m section of the river. I swim there because it makes measuring distance etc easy, but you still need to use your open water skills such as sighting etc. Plus if I am honest, being partially enclosed makes me feel more secure (I know, I am a big wuss). For my swim this morning though I didn't really feel like doing lengths of Bicton Baths, so I thought I would try something new and swim 1500m upriver and then turn around. To do this I used the open water mode on my Garmin 920XT. I have only used it a few times so far, and with mixed results in terms of distance measured, so I was interested to see how it went.

The swim went well enough. There isn't a whole lot to see in the river, bits and pieces, but on the whole it is a lot of murk. I was swimming mainly through moored boats and so I was consciously keeping an eye out for boats on the move, since today would have to be one of the most popular boating days of the year in Perth. I did have to give way to some guys checking their crab pots, but I successfully avoided being crushed by any cruisers, so I count that as a win.

It was certainly a nice change from laps. Unfortunately though I am not convinced by the distance estimate of the 920XT. I know GPS watches have limitations when it comes to tracking an open water swim. They do spend the bulk of the time disconnected from the satellites and so the measurements are always a bit an estimate. Still, my watch clocked my swim at 3200m, which when I checked on Google Earth came out closer to 2600m or so. Now I admit that measuring the swim on Google Earth is hardly down to the metre either. But even allowing for some inaccuracy, that is a 600m discrepancy, which is a little much in my book. Will have to have a bit more of a play I think.

Other than going swimming and spending time with the family, the day has been spent with half an eye on next weekend. Little things like shaving down, getting the bike ready for racing etc. Once I finish here I will be putting the race wheels etc on to the race bike in preparation for tomorrow morning. In the morning I will use my training session as a chance to give the bike a test spin.

All up it has been a nice relaxing kind of day, just as it should be.