Pete: We’ve kicked into our Friday, Saturday and Sunday night paddling schedule. This works as follows:
* I leave work on Friday as soon as possible, and jump into the car (or onto the Tube) with a half-ton of kayaking gear. I get down to Putney (and swear heartily at a few Yummy but Useless Mummys driving 4×4s with the directional awareness of a pinball).
* I get to the boathouse, and sink deep into the luxurious setting of our very own clubhouse (please see inset) photo. Having pulled myself out of the deep leather sofas, I’ll get into some damp, cold kayaking gear whilst freezing my balls off in near-zero conditions.
* Toons and I will grab two very heavy plastic kayaks, and wrestle with the irritatingly difficult hatch covers for about 5 minutes. Having forced them on with hands like ice we’ll then hoist the kayaks onto our shoulders and make our way to the river. In doing so we will need to run the gauntlet of cold metal locks/container doors/gates, helping to reduce our hands to a state barely recogniseable to the rest of humanity.
* We’ll walk down the slipway to the water, and put our boats in the water. We’ll do some painful sprints, to the tunes of our waterproof ipods. We’ve set up some training aids to increase the workload we’re able to generate whilst doing our sprint sessions. Toons came up with the ingenious idea of using practice golf balls. THese have loads of holes on them, and we’ve secured a couple of these to the bottom of each boat with 
bungees. It may not sound like much, but shifting the bungees around to move the balls from top to bottom feels like you’ve attached the boat to the river bottom with an anchor from a cruise ship.
* We’ll push bungees, boats and golf balls up a pristine, empty section of the Thames as London buzzes and thrums around us. The feeling at this point, of stringing together a complex technique whilst the world rushes around you, is just amazing. On both Friday and Saturday evenings I rested during the periods between sprints in one of the most special places in London. I was both in the centre of the most exciting city in Europe and at the same time in a place entirely deserted apart from myself and Toons; we were the only people on the river, and I always feel immense pride and priviledge as we cut through the Thames on a freezing Friday night.
* We’ll retreat to the clubhouse/truck container and coax our now even colder hands through the cold metal locks/doors/gates and pull wet gear from our shaking, freezing limbs. We’ll walk back to Putney congratulating ourselves on a job well done and put freezing, tired muscles to rest.
I think the whole procedure probably has a root in either masochism or misadventure. Not yet sure, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out at some stage before June…
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