So then, readers dearest, I had my little strategy meeting with my coaches (Andrew is my swim coach, Dave is my athletics coach – for future reference, you know) and I managed to unsettle those two poor unfortunates by going a bit conspiracy theory on them. With the Lia Thomas thing, I mean – but they sort of understood where I was coming from.
[That link takes you to my previous journal entry, by the way, in case you were wondering where the ‘previously…’ was]
To forewarn you, though, I’ll be burbling on about my sports a lot in this entry – so I do hope I don’t bore you. I shall endeavour to inject the proceedings with my usual ironic mischief. Just assume it’s important background and that you might get lost and confused otherwise. So pay attention, eh 007? Put that down, Bond. It’s not a toy, that’s my dildo. And no, it doesn’t shoot anything. Stop raising your eyebrows at me. And straighten your tie while you’re at it, you misogynist psychopath.
[Oh here we go. I was wondering when you were going to start burbling about Bond. Shut up, Guy. Haven’t you got some scheming to do on my behalf?]
Actually, by way of amusing digressions, whilst we’re on the subject of Bond I did get to see your ‘No Time to Die’ movie whilst I was in Paris (plus some of your other Bond movies), and I’m going to have to have words with the producers. The words ‘missed opportunities for a reboot’ and ‘taking the series into a dead end’ would need to be invoked. Our series did not make those schoolboy errors, and has now morphed into the classic Bond vs. Spectre scenario, with yours truly as the devious head of that august institution. Every actress wants to play a dastardly, and in my case half-deranged, villainess.
Aside from what you did to Blofeld (clearly celebrating that torture centre also known as HMP Belmarsh), I did in fact quite like your No Time to Die. We don’t have that one in my world, so I was really excited to see a brand new Bond movie. I really liked the ending especially. The schoolboy error I refer to concerns precisely the Blofeld character, though. We do have a version of Spectre (very different from yours), but having my character’s cousin captured at the end of the movie was dumb as anything, let alone killing him off in the next film.
So if they did want to correct that mistake and rescue the sorry saga, then they could simply let me reintroduce my character from the way she was at the beginning, in Goldeneye. If you’re a little confused, by the way reader dear, given that I’m only eighteen, you may have forgotten that I de-aged 31 years when I unceremoniously transitioned into your world. So in reality I am now forty-nine years’ old, with all the experience and knowledge and wisdom that goes with that. It is a distinct advantage, I can tell you. Plus I get to be in my prime again, just at the point when I was sinking into the dreaded menopause. And curiously enough, although there are times when the new friends I have in this world do get the uncanny impression or realisation they really are talking to a middle-aged woman, I do find myself increasingly acting and feeling like an eighteen year old. Maybe it’s the hormones, I don’t know.
Anyhow, if you want my suggestion for your new Bond, then I would say Tom Hiddleston. That’s who we’ve got, and he’s very good at it too. Failing that, you could choose this dude:
Well, I shall have to give you some of our behind the scenes Bond movie stuff another time. For now, I have a different conspiratorial scheme to tell you about.
I am on my lunchbreak at the moment. I always have a huge lunch – training takes up a lot of calories don’t you know. Plus lots of protein for muscle-building. Fortunately I love to cook and I’m very good at it too. If you had a quantum leap accelerator you could ask my children and they’d confirm that. I get it from my mother, in the traditional way. Then when I got married I slipped into the adoring Russian housewife mode (until the apartment bombings happened and I insisted on helping with their counter-terrorism. They weren’t happy about a known British agent getting access to their files I can tell you. But I was very insistent, and reminded them that they could always feed me disinformation). Russian men expect that. Sasha, like most husbands, had his one and only signature dish, though, which was stroganoff. Luckily I like stroganoff. And the KGB tend to get access to the best ingredients. So much for communism.
I digress. But I do have some good news – but you’re not allowed to tell.
First, I told them there’s no way I’m choosing between my two sports. At least not this season. I said let’s just see how far I get with each of them and then reassess in September when the season ends. Did I tell you I’m very good at being insistent?
So, we had to work out a schedule of events. The good news, given that the Lia Thomas shit is going to hit the fan mid-March when she does her American Collegiate competition (at the same pool in Georgia I went to for the Atlanta 1996 Games – it’s a lovely pool), is that even though our Nationals are beginning of April, so I’d be too late to make a fuss and expose this whole psyop crap, Andrew mentioned that there is, in fact, another competition second week of March, namely the Edinburgh International, and all the best British swimmers will be there, plus a sprinkling of Europeans. Now how could I have forgotten that – we do have this competition in my world.
So I said count me in – but don’t warn anyone so I can go there and surprise everyone with my big splash. Then I will be asked to do interviews, and I will talk about how much damage the Lia Thomas thing is going to do both to the transgender community and the world of sports. Because it won’t stop at swimming. One by one all the sporting bodies will jump on the bandwagon. And it’s going to get messy. That’s the point of the psyop, and it’s why I have strong suspicions about Lia Thomas – because if she really cared about (her own!) trans community and her sports then she must know how much damage it will do to trans people and the negative disrepute it will bring to the world of swimming. And yet she still insists on doing it! See what I mean about this whole thing possibly being a total setup?
It is yet another example of how the cabal/monsters/powers-that-shouldn’t-be/1%/[insert your preferred expletive of choice] use division to maintain social control. Get the people squabbling amongst themselves (your so-called ‘culture war’) and misdirect their attention from the real enemy and source of all their woes, which is the Establishment itself. You see all this Lia Thomas thing is simply going to provide yet more ammunition for all those nasty right-wing pseudo-Christian bigots to spout their bigotry, cause untold distress, give anti-Establishment opinion a bad name, and just sow even more civil strife. Whilst the trans community and the sporting community will get innocently caught in the middle and used as a political football. We shall be sacrificed on the altar of discord. Hmm. That’s not a bad sentence that is.
And if Lia Thomas doesn’t realise this then she is stupid and selfish. If she does realise it, then she is an agent provocateuse. Either way, the consequences will be the same.
We shall see.
Oh - I uncovered another spy. This one’s James Jesus Angleton.
Any similarity to J. Edgar Hoover is purely coincidental, you know.
Anyway – you are probably thinking I’m a little arrogant here. Or are you simply wondering ‘how good are you really, Katrina, at these sports of yours?’.
Ok – I think I should tell you what my current personal bests are, and compare that to the national rankings. But you have to promise not to tell anyone, especially not British Swimming (it’s not so bad with the athletics though because I’m only hovering around the top 20-30 right now).
So let’s start with athletics. I mainly do middle distance, like I may have said, although I can do the 400m as well. As I may have mentioned elsewhere I can maintain my vmax for up to about fifteen minutes, so this means the 1500 freestyle and the 5000m on the track are just beyond my upper limit. So I don’t really bother with them. I can do 3000m though (it’s like an 800 freestyle – I can run about four times faster than I can swim), and I can also do hurdles, from 400m to the steeplechase, which is normally 3000m. On that note, by the way, I have my conspiratorial eye on a potential national record. It's in the very rarely done event the 2000m steeplechase, and there is apparently a ‘World Continental Tour’ 2000m steeplechase event this year in Poznan (Poland) at the end of May. The national record to beat is only 6.27.33. That seems really slow to me. The Commonwealth record, which is 6.02.16, seems more realistic. But how cool would it be to beat that one too! For the record, so to speak, the European record is 5.58.81. Now there’s a challenge.
So, when I discovered this I suggested to Dave that this is the one I should really go for – it’s well within my capability of beating and my eventual sponsors will like it, as they love record attempts. Plus there will be a nice fat bonus if I do it. He didn’t really argue with that. He also suggested I should negotiate these records bonuses for something like 10k for a national record, 25k for an area record, and 50k for a world record (whichever is highest in the case of duplicates). World records aren’t going to happen anytime soon so they won’t mind about that one. But the other ones are feasible. So if I can beat 6.02.16 then that’s twenty-five thousand smackeroonies for yours truly. ‘Minus 15% for the agent, Katrina’, Dave reminds me. ‘Pish!’ says I, ‘Pish! What else should I get from sponsorship?’ I ask him. They sort of look at each other and shrug. Then Andrew says ‘if you play your cards right maybe you get two lots of sponsorship, one for each of us?’ He grins over at Dave, who grins back mischievously. I do like my coaches – they have warmly taken to sharing my sense of conspiratorial mischief.
And of course I would be sharing my winnings with them and my clubs. None of it would be happening without them, after all.
Well, we’ll see about the sponsors when the time comes. But this is the reason why I have to train really, really hard before they even know I exist, and be as impressive as possible in these early events. In fact, and this is what we ended up conspiring about, there are a few events in the upcoming indoor athletics season for which I will be eligible, starting with the Lee Valley Open the weekend after next, then possibly finishing with the national indoor championships at the end of February, with some national junior events in between (which Dave reckons I can win) – so if I want to make a splash then I should focus on that first, then switch back to swimming, then do these World Continental Tour things in May/June, then back to swimming in time for the Commonwealth Games.
And I will be a consummate show-off throughout. Glamorous, fun, provocatively sexy and totally mad. Precisely the kind of thing sponsors will love because it will garner me a ridiculous and permanent level of attention. Especially from the tabloids, for that matter. ‘Maybe you should get yourself a controversial boyfriend/girlfriend, Katrina?’ suggests Dave. A grin from me is the required response there, methought. In this game, reader dear, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
And I do very much hope you will come along for the ride.
Sorry, I am digressing yet again.
Right. Athletics. Personal bests. This is all indoor track by the way (it’s 200m laps instead of 400m. I prefer them as it happens – I’m totally in love with accelerating around tight curves, you see, ooh-er. Damn good at it too. Don’t take my word for it – ask Dave. In fact it’s my secret weapon. Understanding physics as I do has tremendous advantages – like Pi equals 4 when motion is involved. That kind of thing.).
I’ll give you my approximate ranking as well, although this is based on last year’s rankings. If you’re interested you can find them here. Otherwise you can just take my word for it. (This link, ‘worldathletics.org’, takes you to the outdoor 400m by the way, simply change details in the field near the top for the other distances; that site is chock full of info/stats on the world of athletics, by the way).
Starting with 400m. About 57 seconds. This sort of time would actually put me around the top 75, although for the indoor I’d be somewhat higher. So from a certain point of view I’m making the rankings harder for myself here, which is a good thing for motivation.
800m about 2.09. This puts me number 50 exactly. Outdoors, that is. Indoors that’s – fuck me! – that’s number 10! Wooh.
“I think we’d best think about getting you to the national seniors, then, Katrina,” Dave was pulling up the rankings as we went through the list, if that explains the little outburst (which I simply had to reproduce for your dearest reader delight).
1500m about 4.17. That puts me number 30 outdoors and, now that’s just silly, that’s what? “Number 7, Katrina.” “Oh, hold on a minute,” exclaims I. “You had your stupid Covid thing didn’t you last year? So there wasn’t much competition, eh?”
He frowns and shrugs. Maybe I should’ve been rudely thrust into your world a year earlier, eh.
“It’s still a good time, though, Katrina,” says he.
We’ll see.
3000m about 9.20 (that’s without hurdles, by the way). “There’s no point looking at last year is there?” says I in a huff. Dave looks at them anyway. “Top 20,” says he.
“Ok,” says I, “presumably you didn’t do anything the year before either, so what does 2019 say?”
He calls up the results and reads them out. “400m. Top 100 outdoor, 40 indoor.”
That’s a harrumph from me.
“800m,” he continues. “Top 60 outdoors, top 20 indoors. 1500m. Woah!” exclaims he. That perks me up. “What?” “Top 20 outdoors and fourth indoors.”
“Hah!” exclaims I. “Has it got 2000m?”
“Let’s see,” says he. “Hmm. Says here the 2000m steeplechase best time is 6.26.14. Aimee Pratt. She’s a steeplechase specialist.”
“Right, so someone hasn’t been updating the official records, then, eh? So much for your fucking Willypedia.”
He shrugs. “It’s only another second. You can probably beat that already.”
“You think?”
“Sure. Tell you what, when you get back from lunch we’ll set up some hurdles and you can give it a go. Just to see what you get.”
“Shall we do a bet on it?”
He narrows his eyes at me. “For what?”
I shrug. Then I’ve got it. “Ah! If I beat the record, despite it being only indoors and somewhat makeshift, then you buy me five albums of my choice. Vinyl, obviously.”
“Hmm. And if you don’t?”
“Well, I’ll do the same for you. Even if your choice of music is tosh.”
“I have very good taste in music, actually.”
“Like what?”
He has to think about this one. He knows I’m quite hot when it comes to music so he doesn’t want to look stupid by saying ‘prog rock’ or some shit like that.
“Erm,”
“Well?”
“Early 2000s indie?”
I think I can offer him a sly smile for that one. “Acceptable.”
So we shake on it. 6.26.14 is the time to beat.
I haven’t done any hurdles or steeplechases yet, by the way. Usually I’d do that come the outdoor season end of March.
What you can see though is that clearly I’m better at slightly longer distances. Ironically, something like 2000m is probably my sweet spot. It’s similar for swimming, where it’s somewhere between 400m and 800m.
You probably want the equivalent with my swimming, don’t you, reader dear? Well, as it happens I’m better at swimming than running, at least in terms of the rankings. My times are kind of equivalent, if you think of it as a quarter of that running distance. So, I can indeed swim 100m freestyle in about 57 seconds or so at the moment. These are all short course times though, so add a few seconds here and there for long course. 25m lengths is short, 50m is long. 200m, that’s actually around 2.04 right now, which pretty much puts me in the top 20. It gets better for the 400m and 800m though, and the IM (individual medley – that’s all four strokes to you and me). 400m freestyle I’m on around 4.18, and around 8.48 for the 800m.
Unless you know something about swimming you won’t notice my pacing there, and how it’s far better at longer distances. That 57 for 100m for example is a 27.5 followed by a 29.5 (if it was a 50m pool, that is). Remember the first length is always about 2 seconds faster because of the dive-off. So I call that a 29.5 pace. For the 200m it drops to 31.5, a whole two seconds, that is. But then you go up to 400m and I’m doing 32.5, and the 800m is almost as fast at around 33, which is hardly any difference at all. For me, everything is really all about pacing. Swim too fast, you run out of energy, too slow, and you don’t make your best time. So the trick is to calculate what your optimum time is for each distance. And you – well, I – do that by selecting a pace and seeing how far I can swim with it (same goes for running as it happens). How do I know what pace I’m going at? Well, that’s the hard work, and it involves a lot of repetitions, with my coach reading out the timings each time, then I adjust for the next repeat (too slow, speed up a bit; too quick, slow down a bit) and get closer and closer to my target pace each time. What I have to do is remember how it feels at each pace. And because I’m something of an obsessive about all this, I insist on not stopping until I can get within 0.1 of a second at least three times in a row, preferably five or six.
This is where I differ from most people when they train. And I did nearly have a bit of an argie-bargie with Andrew when we did our first session last week. After the warm-up he said he wanted me to do some reps (it’s called a ‘set’, if we’re going to be picky about it), and he just said “Ok, do six 100s and your target time to beat is 1.20. You’ve got thirty minutes to do it.” “Bollocks,” says I. “What’s the point in that? It’s a bloody waste of time.” Obviously he was a bit taken aback, to put it mildly and didn’t know what to say for a moment. But then he recovered and said, quite nicely actually, “Why do you say that?” “Because,” says I, “if all I’m doing is beating 1.20 each time then I’m learning nothing about pacing. A better way to do it would be to ask me to swim as close to the target time as I can. And make it faster. You just read out the time after each go, then I adjust accordingly, remembering how it feels to swim at that pace. The more I do it, the more accurate I get. Once I can repeat the target time to within, let’s say 0.1, three times in a row, then I see how far I can swim at that pace. Obviously, I then have to repeat that process for all the different pacings. But that’s how I find out what my optimum time is for each distance. Like, if I can only do 32s for exactly 200m then my optimum time for that race is 2.06. And so on. Then I combine this with gym work to build up my strength, which increases that distance incrementally. See?”
“So you’d have to continually readjust, then? If it feels different each time you get stronger?”
“Ah,” says I with a sly smile, “not necessarily.”
You see, reader, dear, I also happen to have a cunning advantage with my MPD because I can get one of my alters to file it in the Memory Palace and tell me what my pace is whilst I’m actually swimming (or running). There’s nothing in the rules against that, hehe.
“But,” I concluded, in a reconciliatory tone, “you can understand how this is more productive than just wearing myself out doing untargeted reps?”
He had to admit I was on to something there. Of course I am.
The other thing I have to do, obviously, is the old aerobic and anaerobic respiration shit. Anaerobic, that’s sprint stuff, aerobic is longer. Which is why they get me on the bloody bike so much. I’d prefer to just swim for half an hour. It’s load-bearing, it’s resistance training, and it’s stamina-building. So what’s not to love? Everyone should do swimming.
So, that’s how I do my training. It’s an answer to one question people ask me which is how do I find the time to do all the things I do. Well, I simply assimilate all these different aspects of training into a few types of exercise, rather than laboriously do them all separately. After this first week in which Andrew has already seen almost immediate improvements (or ‘gains’ as they call them), it’s really got him thinking and he’s already trying it out with some of the other people in the club. So there, I’ve already had a positive effect on the world. And that makes me feel nice and warm. And maybe it’s not a total dystopia after all. I mean not yet, anyhow. You do still have hope.
Although I do join in the same training sessions as the other best swimmers in the club, because I’m at a higher level already (pretty much nationals level) they usually just rope off a lane for me and let me get on with it. Of course we have lots of coaches here, but Andrew seems to have bagsied me. Dave too, for that matter (although he is a middle-distance specialist). When the two of them came to see me in Paris in December (all expenses paid, get to stay in the Ambassador’s lavish mansion – you’d be a fool not to) they were suitably impressed by my style more than anything else, such that I really don’t need any help with technique. Well, breaststroke maybe, but I don’t talk about that one. This means I can be put on a kind of individual training programme. Chances are when I mischievously sneak up on everyone in Edinburgh (or the nationals) those national coaches are going to want to get hold of me and get me to change clubs to somewhere with a 50m pool. Well, I will be saying no to that one. I love Cambridge and I have friends here and this is my new home, so I’m not leaving. And I don’t care what they say.
Some people might wonder how I can be as good as I am at all this, given I’m quite slim and only 170cm (or about 5ft 8, if you don’t like the metric system and want to go all Royale with Cheese on it), whereas most of those swimmers you see look pretty big and strong and so on. Well, it’s just physics, reader dear. Aside from obvious skill and technique and all that (and I am, if nothing else, stylish as hell, if I say so myself), it’s actually more about muscle-to-weight ratio. Isaac Newton would understand, what with his F=ma equation. Think about it this way. Velocity equals force divided by mass. So there’s your muscle (force) to weight (mass) ratio. Reduce the mass and you can reduce the force to get the same velocity. Or it has to be increased, in the case of these other girls. Furthermore, you have to add resistance to the mass bit of the equation. I offer less surface area to the water than those bigger girls, so that further increases their disadvantage. They’re like, 25-30% heavier and bigger than me. I’m around 57 kilos (call it 9 stone) or so. So they need more muscle (which is more weight) and then there’s the heart muscle and respiratory capacity, and there are natural limits to that stuff. My respiratory capacity is better than theirs because I have a hereditary condition which causes a slight deformity of the alveoli such that my lungs process oxygen better; my body’s adaptation to that is to increase erythropoiesis (oxygen in the blood stream, transported to muscles). This also means I can do more strokes per breath (each time you take a breath it increases the resistance and slows you down). So this is another reason why I’m going to volunteer doping samples, otherwise they might think I’m cheating with EPO.
This also means I do better turns than them. My turns are a sight to behold, believe me. I’m not only smaller so I get closer to the wall when I do it but I also happen to be an excellent gymnast so I get more tucked up and I push off with my feet during the turn – they turn 180 then push off. For me, it’s one single fluid movement. For them, it’s a sequence. So you have to understand that for them, they will take an extra second maybe each turn. So, that’s another reason why I’m better at longer distances.
And this just gets better and better. It doesn’t matter how much weight I put on, because well, it’s my metabolism, darling.
And aside from anything else, there’s no way I’m tolerating myself going for the butch dyke look. If there was ever any impending danger of that then I’d quit without hesitation.
Anyhow, I do hope I haven’t bored you with all this technical stuff. Those two last times I mentioned, by the way, for the 400m and 800m free, in fact, would easily get me in the finals of the nationals, if we’re going by last year’s results (see Britishswimming.org – that link takes you to their results archive). Pandemic notwithstanding (there were only about 20 people in each event last year; normally it’s, like, 70-80 or so). If that 4.18 was in last year’s final that’s 6th place, and the 8.48 I’d have come second. So there. For the 200 IM I’m around 2.18, and 4.48 for the 400 IM. Again, these times get me in the finals already. Although I would’ve come last for the 200, but that 4.48 would’ve got me 6th place in the 400. So I’m doing alright, methinks.
“Your breaststroke’s rubbish, Katrina,” Andrew butts in.
“That’s not what the blokes in the club think, hehe. And you definitely won’t be saying that when I get a gorgeous girlfriend, Andrew my son,” retorts I. “Or boyfriend, equally. And neither will he/she.”
“You’re really not fussy about that, either way?”
I shrug. “Que sera, sera, you know…”
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