Well used

Public holiday in Perth today. I think I officially put it to good use.

This morning it was down to the pool for another swim session. The nice thing about public holidays is that the pool doesn't open until 7:00. Can you say sleep in?

Now that swimming is getting a bit more serious I thought I would start to use the Swim Smooth Guru a bit more for my solo sessions. I still swim with the squad a couple of times a week, but using the Guru lets me keep a bit of structure to the remaining sessions. Don't know what the Swim Smooth Guru is, then have a look at the link to the left of the page. Basically it is a swimming coaching system. It has been built by the Swim Smooth team and so it is based on their methodolgies, the drills, their session plans etc. I find it great for providing session plans, but it equally useful for fault finding, drills, technique advice etc. It is a very impressive bit of software and a great training tool.

At the moment I am working my way through the advanced Half Ironman swim plan tailored to my CSS (Critical Swim Speed). The plan is about 8 weeks worth of training. I figure it will be a good supplement to the squad sessions. Today was session three and it was a nice, solid little 3.2km set with a bit of a mix of everything. Some longer 600m efforts, some quicker stuff, drills and even a bit of open water skills. Today's session was probably the first real testing session I have done since I got back in the pool and it was good to get through it cleanly enough. 10 seconds off pace at the moment I think, but that will come in time. For now I was just happy to get through a 3km set with no pain.

The swimming is not feeling super smooth at the moment. I feel that I am lacking on both the catch and the draw through. I am not too concerned right now though since I am hoping both of those will improve with time and training.

Other than swimming the rest of my public holiday has been spent relaxing and training a bit more. The relaxing bit came by way of spending most of the day at a winery in the Swan Valley eating tasty food and drinking a nice drop or two. It felt all very civilised and grown up. The kids had a ball too.

Once we were home from living it up at the winery it was time to jump on the Kickr for an easy spin. This is a session that was supposed to be done tomorrow morning, but the quirks of the week have required me to do a bit of rearranging of my sessions. As it now stands I did Tuesday's ride today and I will do Wednesday's run tomorrow morning. Moving the sessions makes the rest of the week work better and also means that I got to fill my public holiday quite constructively. Actually I think it will all work out nicely, if the weather plays ball. We are getting some wet weather tonight, I am sitting here listening to the rain as I type this. It is forecast to keep raining all night. I am hoping that it will clear a bit in the morning for my run, but I suspect I might be being a bit optimistic. We shall see I guess.

All up it has been a great day of training and relaxing though. What more can you ask for?