Goldilocks you horrible little person

I was going to call this 'Goldilocks you (insert expletive here)' but once again my parents read this so I have gone a more polite alternative.

I got down to the pool this morning to be told that we were doing a Goldilocks set. That sounds lovely I thought, perhaps there will be porridge, maybe beds, hopefully no bears.

There was no porridge.
There were no beds.
There were bears.
It was not lovely.


It turns out that a Goldilocks set is:

Some 100s
then a 200 - baby bear
Some more 100s
a 300 - mummy bear
Some more 100s
a 400 - daddy bear

This kicker in all this is that it is all done at the same pace, damn you wetronome. That pace is about the speed you would do a 100 in if you were cruising. That gets hard for 200, very painful for 300 and screaming 'I am going to throw up over the side of the pool' agony for 400.

All up it was a good session.

A bit of a recovery run for the afternoon. In the past I have been known to take these runs a bit hard. I may have once or twice had thoughts along the lines of, 'if I run faster for this section I will go further on this recovery run than my last recovery run'. I am pretty sure that isn't the right idea.

The goal for this recovery run will be to make it a recovery run. I have started wearing a heart rate monitor again and I am hoping this will help me keep the run under control. I always used to wear a heart rate monitor, but then I just sort of got out of the habit. But I got some very good advice the other day, along the lines of 'you're an idiot, wear a heart rate monitor'. So I have decided to get back into the habit. The idea of course being that speed alone is not a good enough metric, you need something to measure output so that you have an idea of how effective you are being in getting that speed.

You often read interviews with pros who say that they don't use powermeters or heart rate monitors, but rather just train and race on feel and knowledge of their bodies. I really like that idea, but the other interesting bit of advice I was given the other day was 'you are not a pro'. The explanation behind this is that the pros do massive volumes of training, which they can do because they have the time. This huge volume helps them understand their bodies in ways that the average age-grouper struggles to, simply because they don't have the time to do pro levels of training volume. I have been doing fairly high level sport for a long time and from that I think I have a pretty good ear for my body when it speaks to me. But it only takes 5 seconds to chuck on a heart rate monitor and so I really might as well, particularly if it means I have the monitor to act as a hearing aid when I need it.