Swimmingly

Swim swim swimity swim. Swimming this morning.

Another good session. I really am liking the swimming at the moment, which is so nice because I was struggling there for a while. Still hard to get myself down to the pool for a Wednesday morning smashing, but not as hard as it used to be. Part of that is that I am coping with the sessions just a bit better now. Swimming is going well at the moment, which means I don't have to be so close to my limit in order to simply get through the session. The Wednesday morning sessions are supposed to be tough, but they aren't supposed to be 5km of threshold. In the past they have been a bit like that for me, 3.5 or 4km on the rivet and then exploding. However, at the moment I am able to do them as they are intended, ie looong, fatiguing and quality till the end. Much more enjoyable. Not as big a mental hurdle as well.

A big part of the session going well today was the person in front of me, Carolyn. She is a very experienced swimmer, and in her own words, she is an expert on pacing. The key to most Wednesday morning sessions, and particularly this morning, is pacing. Before the session started this morning somebody asked coach Paul whether the session this morning was hard. In response he sort of laughed and said 'Yes, yes it is hard'. That is never a good sign. He followed it up by telling us that pacing was going to be key to making it through.

The temptation with a lot of training, swimming and everything else, is simply to start hard and hold on until you explode. In my experience triathletes are terrible for doing that. However, it is often not a very effective strategy. A session like this morning is simply too long for that approach to work. It might feel like you are barely moving when you first start out, but by holding back when you can you then have the energy to step it up when you need it. It is a great lesson for training, but a crucial one for racing.

Anyway, back to the session. The session today was four sets of:

300m
500m
4 x 100m

Each set was 2 seconds/100 quicker than the set before. The times started off pretty comfortable and ended up fast. It required you to swim comfortable while the times let you, so that you could then speed up at the end. Swimming behind Carolyn, she forced the our lane to swim just that way. It meant that when we got to the end I was amazed to see that I was still feeling okay. Tired, but still with enough in the arms to find another gear in the final 500m piece when I really needed it. It was a great lesson.