Thursday swim

(Really I should have gone straight onto the bike when I got home, only I am so very fond of blogging, I felt I would burst if I did not write my swimming-related post first! It would be more thoroughly triaspirational if I refrained from blogging until I had finished both parts of the workout...)

It was a good one this evening, I think. I realize I have been slightly discouraged about swimming in recent weeks, mostly just because I am still at this frustrating stage where doing flip turns (of a sort!) makes my swim much less enjoyable and yet they must be done or I will never learn to do one properly. I did them on the warmup lengths, it was dutiful but discouraging, but the emphasis on technique for the first freestyle bit made me feel justified in totally ditching 'em for a bit, which of course leads to the most enjoyable swimming! Like switching from writing poetry in rhyming couplets to blank verse...

(And then a very befinned and bepaddled novice in the next lane over actually complimented me on my flip turns, it was sheer blandishment and the fact is that they are still barely deserving of the name but it made me think about perspectival questions, and the way that one person's slow is always another's fast and so forth. We get very easily used to whatever progress we have made and reproach ourselves for not being already and ever-onwards-and-upwards better, faster, etc. etc. but really progress does come in uneven spurts, it is likely that I have been improving in minor ways over the last few months even if I feel like I'm mostly standing still.)

Warmup: 4 x 150 as follows:

100 free, 50 back
100 free, 50 breast
100 free, 50 fly
100 free, 50 build

Main set (abbreviated):

2 x 100 free drill-swim by 25
2 x 200 free on 4:00 concentrating on technique

(This was the bit that put me in a good mood--I felt very smooth and strong in the water [let us not speculate on how it looked from the outside!], and it was quite feasible to swim them in 3:45 and have fifteen seconds of rest--I would call it medium effort rather than hard, I was just concentrating on form and on doing a brisk open turn at each end and getting a really good kick and streamline off the wall.)

4 x 50 drill-swim stroke in IM order
4 x 100 IM, starting with 20 seconds rest and lowering it by five seconds each time

Time was almost up by that point, so Coach Amy gave me the sensible assignment of 200 easy free with flip turns.

2000 total