Becoming more active: "I made it to the finish line with a huge smile"
Since January, we’ve been hearing from Shona, a 21 year old disability, lifestyle and beauty blogger on her swimming journey and becoming more active. Now, in her eighth blog post for us she tells us about competing in her first triathlon, the Superhero Tri Series and her plans of competing in the 100m swimming section next year.
Last time I posted about my journey with swimming and being more active I told you about how I’d done my best swim of the year so far, which was amazing, and sadly I’ve only managed to get to the pool a handful of times since then. If you’ve kept up to date with my posts you’ll know that in August I took part in the Superhero Series, an accessible triathlon designed to be inclusive for all disabled people and their friends and family.
If you told me last year that I’d be doing a triathlon this year then I probably would have laughed back, it would have seemed like a pretty impossible task. But, with the help of my teammates and family I made it over that finish line with a huge smile on my face.
My teammates did the swimming and cycling sections and then I finished things off by wheeling 1km (in about 12 minutes) in a lightweight manual wheelchair kindly lent to me by RGK for the day. I think swimming this year made a big difference when I was pushing myself, I managed to complete a good portion of it on my own, alternating between me pushing and then a teammate taking over to give me a break. I did the last bit on my own, and it really was pure adrenaline that got me across the finish line in the end, I can totally see why people do these things now.
I had a lot of fun on that day overall and before I’d even started I’d decided that I want to do the full course at some point, whether that be next year or the year after. The swim for the smallest distance is 100m and currently I can swim indoors for about 50m before needing to stop so I’m determined to be able to swim 100m without a break by the start of summer next year.
Of course swimming outdoors in open water will be completely different to a swimming pool but hopefully with a bit of training I can manage it! After that it’s only adapted cycling to tackle and I’m very lucky to have somewhere near me that offers a variety of different bikes for disabled people.
As for swimming, at the beginning of the year I got a new powerchair that took me from being mostly housebound to suddenly being able to do and experience so much. So, I was determined to make this summer the best yet and I definitely succeeded in doing that. In turn though it’s meant that I just didn’t have any time or energy left for swimming, but I’m hoping that after this month, once things have quietened down, I’ll be able to get back to swimming once a week again. Hopefully I’ll be back into a routine by the time I update you all next!
If you didn’t catch Shona’s last blog post, you can read it here.
Keep a look out on our news section, Twitter and Facebook to see how Shona gets on achieving her swimming goals over the next six weeks.
