Turning Corners

I feel like I turned a bit of a corner today. This morning for the first time in days I woke up feeling good. In the pool I felt wonderful.

For most of this week I have been struggling a bit. You may remember in my post on Monday I said my swim had been a real slog. Same for the swim on Wednesday if I am honest. The ride in between on Tuesday felt okay, but even that I was feeling a bit flat for.

All of a sudden though, during my run last night, I found a part of me that felt human, and then this morning, wow, whole new person.

The run last night was a little 20km jaunt by the river. Heading in I wasn't particularly in the mood if I am honest and so I ended up doing the run as a series of 3km out and backs, rather than running out 10km and turning around. I usually don't enjoy running the same 3km over and over (even if it is quite pretty), but last night I think I needed to break the run up in that way to jog the motivation. It seemed to do the trick with the run going really well. Safe to say it was quicker than I intended (and a bit harder), but that is partly because I was just enjoying being out running. Nice sort of session to have the week before a race.

I would have been quite happy with that run, but following it up with the swim this morning has me feeling pretty pumped. I really don't know what changed between Wednesday and today, but swimming today felt great. Actually that maybe isn't quite right, I have a suspicion of what has changed. For most of this week I feel like I have been operating under a bit of a fatigue debt. I am coming off three weeks of solid training, plus I plain wasn't getting enough sleep for the first half of this week. It just seemed to take off the edge. I think today I finally managed to catch up and that is what I saw in the pool.

This morning we were swimming two or three seconds per 100 quicker than Wednesday and it felt easy. I will admit I wasn't at the front of the pack so there was some drafting benefit, but that was the case on Wednesday too. I have been working so hard in the pool over the last couple of months that I was a bit frustrated by the sessions earlier in the week, it sort of felt like I hadn't got anywhere. The swim this morning though showed that perhaps that work is starting to give some rewards. Like everything, still a work in progress, but I will happily take the progress I have made for now.

My last big weekend of training before taper begins tomorrow with a ride and you better believe I will be out on the new Ridley Dean. The forecast is for it to be wet, wet, wet, but the rain is supposed to hold off until the afternoon. I really hope that is the case. I would love to be out in the dry for once. It feels like it has been a while since that happened (although really it has only been since Tuesday). Still nobody likes a long ride in the rain so fingers crossed for clear skies.