Today, as is normal, it was down to Bicton Baths for a swim in the pool. Regular readers will recall that I have in the past swum in the river on the occasional Monday morning, but one instruction from Dr Gary was no more solo open water swimming, so in the pool it was for me. Besides I read in the news this morning that high rainfall we have had in Perth recently may have caused sewerage to flow into the river 150km or so upstream. Long way upstream for sure, but all the same, I think I am happy to have been in the poo, er I mean pool (see what I did there). Still it did look quite magic.
The session was one of the more comfortable pool swims I have had for a while. I attribute some of this comfort to the amount of drill I was doing. As is my normal routine, today's session contained 1000m or so of drills, which tend to keep the intensity of the session down. However, the drills weren't the sole reason for the swim being more comfortable. The remaining couple of thousand metres of normal swimming felt okay too. With the normal swimming I think the comfort came about mainly from re-calibrated expectations. During my swim on Friday I found that once the distance was increasing up to 400m or so of continuous swimming, I was getting very uncomfortable. It was like, as the effort got longer, my heart struggled more and more to keep up. Based on that, today I wasn't trying to swim more than 300m continuous, even during the warm up I paused after 200m to give my heart a chance to relax a bit. Giving the heart a break so that it could resume its normal rhythm between sets meant that I got through the session feeling much more comfortable.
Obviously stopping every 200m means that the training wasn't as effective, but I am happy to live with that for now. I found that I was still struggling with fatigue by the time I reached 3000m, even with the stops, so I was obviously still working. I am hoping that as fitness builds I will be able to extend the distance and get the training looking a bit more like normal, but I am not going to rush that process. Happy to take what I have got for now.
Riding tomorrow if everything goes to plan. Fingers crossed I can have a repeat of yesterday's ride.
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