Last year I caught the train to London with Iain.

“Have you got the tickets?” I asked.

An innocuous question, only made less innocuous by the fact the train was pulling out of Glasgow Central.

“No,” he said, “you’ve got them”.

Which I did – or didn’t. Because, while I had them on my phone with all details teasingly shown on my Trainline app, it was just a reservation and not the tickets themselves. The tickets were still sitting unprinted in the ticket machine at Central Station.

I could have cried. But, critically, didn’t because I’m a man and men don’t cry on trains. Not unless they’ve just read “A Boy In The Water”.

“A Boy In The Water” by Tom Gregory tells the story of how he became the youngest person to swim the English Channel. It’s no spoiler to confirm he succeeds, because, unlike most sports biographies, this one doesn’t rely on peril.

There’s a trend in biographies to tease the did he/she or didn’t he/she do it. The first chapter inevitably details some element of danger as the lone cyclist tries to cross the world only to inadvertently cycle into the middle of warzone, on the very day that the local Celtic and Rangers fans are watching the Old Firm game, during a hurricane  – and they get a puncture. Oh my, I definitely need to read all of this now!

Instead, A Boy In The Water, deals with trust and faith between a boy, Tom Gregory, and his coach as he’s pushed to swim further and further. And it’s this trust which provide the tension because it’s never clear how much of the goal was driven by the boy or the coach and whether it was right for an 11 year old to even attempt such a swim.

Written from a child’s perspective, the book is simple and clear, with the relationship explored through a back and forth between the swim itself and the three years of training leading up to it. Training sessions in Dover Harbour, solo swims across Lake Windermere, and a sense of sporting success achieved through coffee mornings, battered vans and digestive biscuits as treats. And very little discussion of swimming. There’s no passages describing swimming strokes, or the goals of any training sessions, just brief powerful descriptions of the swimmers, the coaches and the music listened to on homemade mix-tapes. And, an ending, which managed to show how powerful trust and faith and belief can be and what happens when they’re gone. I may even have shed a tear on the train on the way to work this week as I read the final chapters on the way to work…

You can buy it here: Amazon

Every Wednesday morning at 7am I join the Glasgow Triathlon Club’s swim session at the University of Strathclyde. I’ve been going along on and off for around six months and, this week, for the first time, our coach didn’t ask me to change my stroke or the position of my head or the way I kick my legs, instead I was asked to concentrate on turning around when you get to the end of a lap.

That’s right – I’m being coached on how to turn round!

The phase “like a tanker” was used.

Tanker should never be a word used with a swimmer unless you’re saying “hey, swimmer, watch out for that tanker!”

According to our coach you need to be pushing in and then pushing off and your head should act like a schythe through the water and not a brick.

All of which made no sense to me.

You swim to the end. You turn around. You come back. How can I get that wrong?!?

For the next hour every time I got the end I became nervous, not knowing whether my hand was right to push in an push off or if my head was as light as reinforced concrete.

On one lap, I even did a tumble turn. Not deliberately, I just sunk through indecision then tried frantically to right myself up while not drowning.

I know that swimming is all about technique but when that technique involves something you’ve never thought about before it’s very hard to change what you’ve always done. Thousands of laps of the pool have always seen me turn one way. Now, I’m being asked to think again. It’s not easy.
But it is good to be challenged even if, next week, I’m sure my next lesson will be how to climb into the pool using the ladder correctly.

Either that or, having mastered coming back, the coach will say “Now, let’s talk again about how you actually swim a lap correctly…”

There are many different records. Some will never be beaten. You can’t be the first person on the moon when Neil Armstrong got there first. Nor can you climb Everest when Edmund Hillary did it over sixty five years ago. Some records last.

Others are less serious. If you read the Guinness Book of World Record you’ll find a record for the world’s longest fingernails. A world record which literally doesn’t require you to lift a finger – in case you break a nail.

Or how about Etibar Elchyev, who took the title for ‘Most spoons balanced on a human body’ by balancing 50 spoons. He’d have balanced more but Sharon from accounts wanted to make a cup of tea and he ran out.

Or, worse, instead of spoons. How about balancing bees? Chinese beekeeper She Ping covered his body with 330,000 bees.

I think I’ll stick to cutlery.

But as records become devalued – you cannot compare spoons and bees with standing on the moon – we each have the opportunity to find our own records. If you join Strava you too can be a record breaker as every route or part of routes is carefully broken down into segments to create mini record opportunities. Do you want to be the fastest person to run along your street? Then create a segment and run faster than anyone else running along it. Or, if you can’t run fast, at least walk it while carrying 330,000 bees and claim the record for fastest person to be stung to death on your street.

Despite how easy it is to claim a record, record still matter. Or at least they do to me. We want to know who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest, who’s the most likely to open a cafe and not need cutlery. And I want to know who’s the fastest at running the only hill in Stornoway: The War Memorial.

It’s not the steepest or longest or hardest climb but it does provide a few minutes of running to take you to a vantage point over the whole of Stornoway and out to the mainland.

And for the last few years I’ve been trying to be the fastest to run up it. It’s my Everest, moon and jumbo onion (another official world record).

And two weeks ago I almost managed it. I almost had my onion.

The weather was poor. The wind was in the wrong direction. I didn’t even think I was running hard enough to make an attempt on the record when, I got home, checked Strava, and, blimey, I was the second fastest in the world.

Which is the one record no one wants – no one wants to be second! What’s the point of having 49 spoons on your body when the man up the road has 50?!?!?

So, in two weeks, I’ll be home again and I’m going to go all out for the record. I’m going to run like 330,000 bees are chasing me. This record will be mine or I’ll cry like a man who just peeled the world’s largest onion!