Blissful Saturday swim practice

Very, very enjoyable, definitely the best thing that has happened to me all week.

- We got into the pool 20 minutes early - usually it is a very tight hour, more like 57 minutes, even for the weekend workout, which does not leave enough time for proper warmup and long workout.

- I am exercise-starved! My legs deserved a proper recovery week after the excesses of late November, and I gave it to 'em, but that does not mean I have to like it. I felt mildly out of sorts all week, cannot disentangle cause and effect on that one. But the end-of-semester schedule is very crazy, too, so I had only short and mostly pretty easy swims this week, no running at all. (I will have a real run later this afternoon or tomorrow morning, depending on various other factors related to my impending move round the corner.)

- It was mostly freestyle! With suitably paced lane-mates, though it got a bit chaotic at several points (causing the other woman in the lane to utter the immortal and irritable words "Boys don't pay attention to the clock!").

- But really I just love real swim practice, and I must try and go to one of the 90-minute ones on a more regular basis- a one-hour swim is not enough!

- NB my fly fitness is showing the benefits of even just a couple weeks of actually working on it - remarkable...

10 minutes stretching (there is usually a 30-minute dryland session before this workout, only we cut it short to get into the pool early)

A different coach from usual, I suppose it is stimulating to switch it up in terms of the coachly imagination - people's minds tend to run in a similar way even when they are composing different workouts, I like the regular coach very much but this was a nice change also.

Warmup: 200 free easy, 200 stroke easy (I did 100 back, 100 fly drill-swim by 25), 200 free medium, plus 100 as 50 back, 50 free to fill in extra bit of time

Set #1: 16 x 50 free in sets of 4 descending: first set on 1:15, then 1:10, 1:05, 1:00. Nice to concentrate on the different "gears" in that kind of a freestyle set, though it is still too much of a mental challenge for me to track my actual times when we're switching around the intervals on irregular numbers...

Set #2: 5 x 200 free with 50 kick moving from first to fourth position in set (last one all swim hard)

Set #3: 6 x 100 choice; first 3 as 75 hard 25 easy, second 3 as 75 build, 5 seconds rest, then sprint the last 25 all out. I did all IM except for the last, when I decided after 25 fly and 25 back that really I should do the last 50 all fly - it was fun! (I should have done all of the last 3 as 100s of fly, but I thought I would save some energy for notional run later on!)

50 back cooldown

That was a very, very enjoyable workout indeed. 3150 yards total - more than I usually do, I like it, I want to do one like that every week!