Thu - 14/09/23

Thursday 14 September 2023

Weather

The end of the warm weather in the UK seems to be approaching. It is around 19°C today with more cloud later some very light rain this evening.

 I am starting my Pescara blog today. I've been doing swimming lessons and I am improving. Lorraine has given me a training programme for Pescara. It is this:

 Warm up, with front crawl then breast stroke. Then do a 5 minutes continuous swim, then practice whichever stroke(s) I like and then cool down.

·         Repeat daily and add one minute to the continuous swim each day.

 I have started my trip preparation by reading hotel reviews on TripAdvisor and booking.com. I have packed a few things accordingly, like toilet roll for instance. The hotel toilet paper gets bad reviews. Also, swimming caps are compulsory when swimming in the hotel pool. I have bought two and will take them both.

 I have planned a trip to Rimini for the parkrun and added bar code apps and widgets to my smartphone and Garmin FR55.

I have checked my transport apps and copied my National Express tickets and my Italian train tickets from the National Express and Tren Italia apps into my iPhone wallet. My booking.com hotel bookings are also in the wallet. I also printed paper copies of these tickets. NB. British Airways check-in and boarding pass for the outbound flight will be available 48 hours before the flight. For this trip, that is from Sunday morning at 8am. I noted that BA has a new app for iPad. It seems to be targeted at flight bookings, but I have already booked my flights. So, I have retained the original BA app on my iPad. At least I can see my existing flight details on there. The iPad app uses e-mail as the log in parameter, the old app uses loyalty club number.

 Also, on the lead up to the trip I have reviewed by belongings list. Let’s see if I can avoid forgetting things and also avoid taking too many unwanted things. Note that this is my first trip where swimming will be regular activity.

 This evening I followed a training plan on my Garmin. It was a 35 minutes session – 5 mins warm up, 15 minutes, an optional 10 minutes and 5 minutes cool-down. I could only manage a brisk-ish walk, with ocassional short jogging bits. So I opted to head along Farmwood Close, Glanwern Avenue, Cotswold Way, then up the steep stepped footpath to the Christchurch Road Motorway bridge. I went back down Christchurch Road, down Beechwood Road and along Beechfield Avenue to finish.