Learning Experience

Another day, another bit of training under my belt.

Today the training was the Friday morning Swim Smooth session down at Claremont. This morning though there was no big miles or leading of lanes like there sometimes is on Fridays. Instead, this morning was all about being conservative and finding where my limits are currently sitting.

Of the three legs of triathlon, swimming is probably the one that has been feeling the most uncomfortable with this current heart wobble. That is quite an adjustment for me, since swimming is the leg that has always come easiest to me. It is strange to have swimming become hard. I suspect that the difficulty comes from not being able to breath as much. I find I can swim quite comfortably up to a certain speed, but it is when I try and push above this speed that the oxygen demand goes up and things become squirrely, as I found this morning. I was okay during the warm up and the easier efforts, but once the speed started to crank up I started to struggle. In the end I needed to grab my pull buoy and paddles to get me through the last few hundred metres.

This morning's session has forced me to think about training a little more, considering just what it can look like. I have been swimming with this funny heart beat for a few weeks now and it hasn't stopped me before. It has been uncomfortable, but I have 'pushed on' telling myself that I just need to regain fitness. This morning though I was easing back rather than pushing on. I even sat out a couple of hundred metres to regain my breath. That made me think, 'am I just being soft here, overly sensitive perhaps, I was getting through this stuff before'. Well perhaps, being soft is always a possibility, but rather I think that having some firmer diagnosis as to what is going on with my heart has made me more conservative. Rather that 'pushing on' I now know that stepping back is the wiser course of action and that is what I was doing this morning.

What does this mean? Well not a lot has changed from earlier in the week. Yesterday I wrote about training, but within my limits. That is still the case. With swimming going forward, perhaps I will need to use those pull buoys and paddles a little more. Perhaps I will have to drop down a lane? It is all about finding the zone where I can train and still remain relatively comfortable in regards to my heart. That will take a little bit of time.


While the swim may have been a bit uncomfortable, it wasn't all bad though. I did get to crack out these new bathers from Mako.

Slick

Besides being a learning experience for me, this morning was also a very, very wet one. Well you were swimming I hear you say, but no, it was more than that. Last night and this morning we had the second wettest February day on record. We got about 114mm, to put that in context Perth usually only gets about 700mm of rain in an entire year. It has rained and rained and rained. It made for some soggy looking coaches on the pool deck this morning, I think we may have been drier in the pool.

And yes, that is Swim Smooth Head Coach Paul Newsome wearing a shopping bag. As they say necessity is the mother of invention.

Tomorrow hopefully the learning will continue, with a bit of a spin on the bike. If I am lucky it may even be outside.