In all seriousness, it is great to feel like I am finally settling back into the routine of training. As I mentioned the other day, the last three weeks of training have felt fairly disjointed and so it is great to feel like I am finding some rhythm again.
Settling back into my nice comfy training groove meant that this morning it was time to swim. As with last week this morning I went for a lovely open water swim with a mate rather than jumping in the pool as I usually would on a Monday. The reason for the recent change to the river isn't for any anti-pool sentiment, I have simply changed to the river for the last couple of weeks because a mate has been in town. He is a fly in, fly out worker and so he isn't always around to swim with. He is a good match for me speed wise (besides being an all around decent fella) so when he around I always try and make the most of it, getting out in the open water when the opportunities arise. This morning was one of those opportunities.
Like last week the river this morning was quite lovely. Flat and calm, just the way I like it. I was going to say the temperature was perfect too, but that isn't quite true. The temperature of the river was mostly okay, except for these random patches of freezing cold water that seemed randomly distributed around. Mostly the cold water was only on the surface, but each time you hit one it was enough to take your breath way. Yuck. Besides the cold bits though, very pleasant.
I have to say though that as lovely as the river was I just wasn't really feeling the swimming this morning. I was sort of struggling to feel comfortable, losing water to my swimming buddy Chris. When Chris starts getting fit he is a quicker swimmer than me, which is kind of good because it gives me someone to chase. Knowing that he is often quicker than me doesn't make me enjoy losing his toes any more, but this morning I just felt like I couldn't keep up. Oh well, you can't win every battle.
The other frustration from the swim this morning was more mundane. Mundane but not unexpected. It was the damn open water tracking by my Garmin. This is the course it gave me after this morning's swim.
See if you can pick the error...
Now don't get me wrong, I like Garmin, they make some great products and what they have done for mobile GPS has revolutionised the metrics we use in many sports. But man, the open water tracking can do my head in sometimes. What the hell happened there, I just suddenly swam up the road for 100m? On that particular lap the Garmin measured it 200m too long.
I use a Garmin Forerunner 920XT when I swim and my mate Chris uses a Garmin 910XT. Chris has no such issues, his Garmin seems to track his swims without fail every time. What did Garmin do, decide to upgrade the watch and just make open water swimming suck more. I get that what the watch is trying to do is quite difficult, I understand the limitations of using GPS in water, but still other devices don't seem to have the trouble, I don't get my why 920XT is so poor. I have tried a few things to fix it (turning on GLONASS etc) and it seems to have improved it, but as this morning demonstrates, it certainly hasn't fixed it. Very annoying.
Still I can't complain too much (more) because besides bizarre GPS behaviour the swim was really pretty great and in the end that is the main thing.
Tomorrow, more training.
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