10am, 30th September. I met George Gardiner at Marks Hall Sports College. George is the Partnership Development Manager for Harlow School Sports Partnership. We talked about how school children could be involved in the project and he is going to chat to the Head of Art about the possibility of working with a group of children who would be in the last year of compulsory education by 2012.
11am, Anne arrives for training. The taxi has her racing chair in the boot and the driver begins to fix the wheels back on, but he hasn’t quite got it right and Anne takes over.
The sports centre has run out of bottles of water (!) So Anne buys a fruit drink, I drink half of it and we empty it out and fill it with water.
The track is at the back of the building, its a harsh open space with little character and a chilly wind and grey skies didn’t help. I asked Anne if it was OK to video her and I ran a tape while we chatted about training and how the chair worked and about getting grumpy when you miss a training session.
Anne completed two laps and then took a break before another two, and another two and some practice starts. Inbetween we talked about lungs, heart rates, chair crashes, training schedules, illness, endurance, strength, arm muscles, motivation, comfort, coaches, speed, gloves, equipment and loads of other stuff and I took photographs.
I quite fancied running around the track with Anne but it was just a romantic notion – I would have needed my pushbike to keep up!
