Light Weight

As of this morning my mind is just a little bit lighter, a weight has been removed from it.

What sort of weight you ask?

The weight of knowing that I had some swimming time trials on the horizon.

Those trials where this morning and are now done, weight off my mind.

It is funny, because it is just a time trial in training. Time trials that all up take up no more than 8 minutes. But I couldn't help it, it was playing on my mind. I didn't sleep that well last night, not quite pre race jitters, but something like it. I am not sure why I was getting so nervous about it. I think it was mainly due to the fact that it is a test. You go in, you get timed, you get a result. That always gets me uptight.

Plus, you know, it kind of hurts.

Anyway, it went wellish. The test is made up of a 400m time trial, a bit of a rest and then a 200m time trial. Plugging these times into an algorithm allows you to calculate your CSS pace. CSS stands for Critical Swim Speed (I admit that I had to look that up). In theory it gives an estimate of the pace that you could hold for 1500m flat out, assuming that you are fresh. I gather it is a reasonable estimate, but I don't plan on doing 1500m flat out to find out. More relevant to us though is that it gives us a basis for all our training sets, since most of them are based on CSS +/- a certain amount of time.

The times I did for the time trials were about in line with what I expected, given what I have been doing in training. In the end that is all I was after, so I was happy with that. Actually, the 200m was slightly quicker than I expected, so I was quite chuffed about that. One of my concerns was that I would bomb out for some reason and that didn't happen, so that was also good news. More importantly the result was an improvement over my last test. I haven't done one for a while (the tests seem to coincide with races) but since my last one my CSS has come down by a couple of seconds, which I am very happy about. It doesn't sound like much, but not so long ago I had more or less resigned myself to the fact that my swimming was not getting any quicker. For me, small gains in swimming are big news.