What, pray, I hear you ask, is a Twiathlon? It is an annual event comprising two athletic disciplines, Twitten running and outdoor pool swimming. The first requires, as I may have explained before, runners to meet at 9 am on a Sunday outside the All Saints Centre in Lewes, whence they go to run twelve twittens, a Sussex dialect word for an alley or passage, from Broomans Lane in the east to Keere Street in the west.The runners run up a twitten, regroup at the top, walk to the next, and then jog down. At Keere Street they pause for a photograph, and then do it all again, this time running up those they jogged down on the way out, and jogging down those they ran up.
The swimming element consists of twelve lengths of the Pells Pool. We accomplish the tricky changeover by going to Ground Coffee in Lewes, and taking an espresso, flat white, macchiato or cappuccino, according to taste, and then ambling down to the pool, justly celebrated in a new book, the Lido Guide (in which the Twitten runs archivist, Rob Read, is deservedly acknowledged).
This time there were seven of us who completed both legs. In the running, I found myself at the back of the pack for each twitten, my usual place these days. Perhaps I need to persuade some slower and even more decrepit runners to join in, to make my performance look better.
We were lucky with the weather, at least for the swimming part, for the sun shone and the water was, allegedly,warm. But I haven’t swum for a long time, and I found it very hard so I found I had to alternate lengths of crawl with breaststroke. I should swim more often.
