Thursday swim practice

Ah, I am back in the land of regular workouts and copious blogging!

I dithered about whether to go to swim practice, and got there a bit late (I forgot that the women's pool locker room is being renovated, it led to minor complication), but I was very glad I went - it was a very enjoyable swim - but also there was a sign up announcing that the pool would close at 8 this evening, so I would have been thwarted if I had gone later for a quiet one on my own. Slightly restricted hours over the weekend, as it is the end of spring break.

I missed pretty much the whole warm-up, and then found myself (though in my usual lane) swimming with 3 guys who range from somewhat to considerably faster than I, so I had to leave out a lot of 50s along the way! But it was just fine - there is no slower lane doing the real workout, so that is the way it has to be. Interestingly I find it is the technique that really suffers from a couple weeks out of the pool, not so much the fitness - I have been very worried about lost fitness (usually this couple weeks of relative downtime would not so much trouble me, only the couple weeks before I left were also fairly scanty on the exercise count), but really it should be OK. Coach gave me a good tip re: overly straight left arm without much of a catch - I skipped some 50s in aid of really paying attention to technique, and it definitely got better. I will do some drill bits on my own over the weekend to try and get back into the right feel for things.

So: (my modifications will make this look fairly pitiful! But I really did enjoy myself, which is perhaps the more important thing...) the notion was recovery IM bits in between distance freestyle sets.

50 warmup

8 x 25 IM order (2 times through) on :40

2 x 300 free on 5:00 (I did 2 x 250 - I skip the second-to-last 50 to let the faster folks overtake for their last 50)

8 x 25 IM order on :40

3 x 200 pull on 3:35 (I just did 1 x 150 and 2 x 100 for these - this was where the coach gave me the advice)

8 x 25 IM order on :40

3 x 100 descending on 2:00, 1:50, 1:40

50 easy

2 x 50 hypoxic (4 breaths - this I can manage - I should try it with only three, though, as that is more of a challenge) on 1:30

That is only 1950, much shorter than a usual workout (I lost too much time at the start), but it was perhaps suitable for easing me back in!

Hmmm, I need a long musing on the next couple months of training plan, but I think I will be well advised to eat some dinner first before digging in for a really copious post!