Saturday 8am - London Fields Lido

We started Saturday with an early morning meeting outside London Fields Lido. Since only Shirley had managed to join the three of us at one pool on Friday it was exciting to find ourselves joined by a whole group of swimmers on Saturday morning. Jo, Ally, Zeb and John were planning to swim all of Saturday with us while Matt, Cat and Dorrie had sacrificed a Saturday lie-in to swim London Fields with us.

The 10 of us found the pool filled with early morning lap swimmers and there was a real buzz as industrious swimmers powered up and down the lanes. London Fields is another Lido that had been derelict for many years before local residents fought to reopen the pool in 2006.

The early morning bustle of lane swimmers at 8am on a Saturday morning just shows how well used the pool is and it seems ridiculous how difficult local residents found it to reopen. After the distance they’d swum on Friday Libi and Chris were surprised at how tough they found it to swim only 400m on home turf. In contrast everyone else made light work of their first 400m and even Pete’s efforts the day before seemed to hardly slow him down. We grabbed a coffee and some toast and jam at the Lido’s “Hoxton Beach” café while we filled out Libi’s favourite paperwork. After each pool we would record how for each swimmer had swum and how much each Lido had enabled us to add to the sponsorship pot.

At London Fields we swam a total of 4500m and London Fields support meant we were able to add the £33.10 to the LEPRA fund.