1) It will warm up. Both after you get in and from week to week. Two weeks ago I swam at Hampstead Heath ladies pond. On Sunday I did the Capital Tri 750m Splash. The water was 2C warmer and though that might not sound like a big difference, it seemed warmer. Or I was less of a wuss. I’ve swum at Stoke newington Reservoir many times now and I know that by the time I get to the first buoy, I won’t be cold any more. And that’s what happened on Sunday.

2) If you find a pair of goggles that you love, never let them go. My current pair are amazing. But user error meant they started leaking a few hundred meters into the swim. So I swam with one eye for a while until I seized my moment turning and emptied them out. Unfortunately another user error meant I pressed them onto my face too tightly and for the rest of the race it felt like my eyeball was being sucked out my skull.

3) Swimming outside is better with friends. I chatted to Laura and Alex at the start – mainly we all worried about how cold it would be and how slow we’d be. One of us went on to win the 750m race. It wasn’t me.

4) Think about one thing at a time. It’s a complicated business swimming. I try to think about it in bits. For the first 100m I thought about relaxing and slowing down my breathing. Then it was my hands – spearing the water like coach Chris had told me to. For the second half I thought about moving my hands faster. Maybe I should have thought about this sooner but there were too many other things going on in my head. Like…

5) Singing and counting. There’s not a lot else to go. Singing or counting (one, two, three, breathe) will help you calm down and get your breathing under control in the first bit. And it can help you go a bit Zen if you’re swimming a long way, and entertain you if you get bored. Go prepared with songs. One woman in the changing room said she’d listened to the Bradley Wiggins episode of Desert Island Disks and had just one line of an Oasis song she didn’t know stuck in her head all the way round.

6) Everyone thinks they’re slower than they are. In the changing room the 3000m swimmers had said to each other how they’d been overtaken by ‘all the 750m swimmers sprinting’. Moments before I’d said that I’d been overtaken by ‘all the 3000m swimmers sprinting the last bit.’ everyone assumes that everyone else is faster. Some people swim faster than others. Don’t worry about it. Because…

7) It’s ok to take your time. I wanted to swim the 750m faster than I had done the same distance in the pool at the previous week’s pool triathlon. But when I got in the water I all I wanted to do was get warm and get round. I finished my lap feeling good and like I could do another. I’d had a nice first swim back. it was faster than the pool tri by a couple of minutes, and over the summer I’ll probably go faster still. But as long as I don’t start swimming backwards, I’m not too fussed how long it takes right now. because I swim in lakes now,