Neglect

Another day, another step back towards normal.

Still feeling quite congested if I am honest, but it is improving and a lot of the rest of me feels more like normal. I am still taking it a bit easy, but Monday tends to be a bit like that anyway.

With the taking it easy in mind, this morning I headed down for a fairly cruisy swim in the local pool. I want to make sure I am still recovering and so I did keep the session low intensity, but it was just really good to be back in the water after not swimming particularly much last week.

The swim session was mostly long freestyle and some paddles work, although I did also fit a 1200m technique/drill set in there. I don't get that many chances to spend a lot of time on drills and so I like making the most of my Monday swim in that regard if I can. I do agree that you can't simply drill your way to swimming quickly, you have to do actual work too, but I do think drills have a place in a weekly training plan. I know what some of my problems are (in regard to swimming that is) and what drills are good for improving those problems and so that is what I spend my time working on. A bit of personalised improvement work.

Besides the swim, the other main part of training today is a bit of an easy spin on the bike. For something a little bit different I have done the ride by cycling into work and home again. I wouldn't usually choose to break a ride up like that, but it has made my day just a little bit more efficient. Plus it actually results in more total ride time. Not something I will choose to do every time, but a bit of a change for today. I always find riding home to be a good way to finish off a day too. A nice chance to clear the head and switch off from the office.

For another bit of difference the ride to work was done on my TT this morning. I don't usually ride the TT bike during the week, and I almost never ride it into the office, but unfortunately my roadie is currently occupied at Churchill Cycles getting some much needed love and affection. Leading into Ironman WA I spent a lot of time riding my TT bike only (for understandable reasons) and so the road bike got a little neglected. After Ironman I switched back to the road bike, but since then it seems that every time I ride the bike I find another problem. I have fixed some of them, but a few others have built up. The latest issue was that I lost shifting to half of my rear cassette, probably due to a stretched cable. I took it to Churchill Cycles on the weekend to get the rear shifting sorted and the guys at the shop have said they found a few other things too, so it is probably a good thing that I took it in. The poor road bike tends to cop more abuse and less care than the race bike does, so it deserves a bit of TLC now and then.

With all that done, the rest of the day is my own and so the plan is to head down to a local pop up market for some dinner. Riding and then yummy food, not a bad way to finish it off.

Tomorrow - more training.