Magic Neoprene

Wetsuits make everything better. Today I got to bounce back from Wednesday's disappointing swim in the best way, chuck on the wetsuit, return to the pool and smash today's swim set in the face.

Needless to say it was a good session.

Bit of a funny session, pretty short, but also pretty intense. If you jump on the Swim Smooth website you will see some words on there about establishing your threshold training pace. They do it a couple of different ways, but the main way is using a 400m and then a 200m time trial. We do them in training every now and then to checkup on how we are progressing. Anyway that is what we did this morning.


It went surprisingly well. Obviously being in a wetsuit my times were quicker than they would usually be. But even still I was happy with how much quicker and also with how it felt. In fact it was my quickest ever 400, even faster than when I was a teenager (although that was without a wetsuit).

I was also very happy with the breakdown of the splits, which were pretty even across the 400 and 200 (the splits in the 200 were quicker obviously). I often start pieces like this too quickly, but trying to pace evenly was one of the aims of the set and so it was nice to get that right.

It was great to bounce back from Wednesday. Waking up this morning I was still feeling flat. Daryl had given his blessing for me to have a sleep in this morning and it was very tempting. But I knew that with a wetsuit this session would probably be feeling better. It was another one of those days that I am very glad that I got myself out the door.

The only downside to the swim this morning was that I got a tear in my wetsuit.

 

I use my wetsuit quite a bit and so damage was probably inevtiable. But I take great pride in taking care of my wetsuits, I have never had any finger nail tears etc (probably because I bite my nails). So I was a bit gutted to do this by catching it on a lane rope doing some recovery backstroke. The photo possibly makes it look worse that it is, it is pretty small, less than 1cm across. Still it was very upsetting at the time. I have been assured that it should be easily repairable, so that has made me feel considerably better.

In other good news I got complemented on how my body was looking by a complete stranger today. A female complete stranger as well. The fact that she was a pensioner doesn't reduce the value of the complement in my mind...

To be honest it was a very strange moment.

Afternoon off today. I am planning on resting the heck out of it.