Today I deliberately chose to not too much exercise, no riding, no jogging, just a bit of walking and a quick trip to the gym. The slackness wasn't entirely due to laziness though, instead it was a little bit targeted.
The reasoning behind my slackness was my ride yesterday. After the ride I thought there was a good chance that I had probably overdone it a little, if not in duration then almost certainly in intensity. With the over exertion of the ride I thought it would probably be a wise to give myself a bit of a rest today. Which is just what I did.
I am still hopeful that I will be allowed to do more vigerous exercise than I currently am, however, I want to make sure I don't try to do too much until I get the okay from the Doctor to do so. On that front I am still waiting to hear from Dr Stobie about the results of my Holter Monitor and to have my stress test booked in. I should hear early next week, but until those things happen I am going to be sticking on the conservative side of exercise. Hence the lack of training today. Besides, what I am learning at the moment is that when you aren't training for an event, it is significantly easier to justify being slack.
Besides not doing exercise I also spent a bit of time down the pool helping out at the Friday Morning Threshold session.
Today was one of those swims where I was more than happy to be standing on the pool deck. This morning the dreaded Goldilocks Set was on the program. One of the more painful ways to swim 3000m. Whilst it is not my favourite set to swim, it was interesting to watch.
Goldilocks is made up of a number of 100s (usually somewhere between 6 and 12 depending on speed) broken up with a 200, 300 and finished with a 400. The idea is that the entire thing is swum at about threshold pace with a tight turnaround. The key to doing Goldilocks well is pacing. Those who do the first set of 200s too fast never make it through in one piece. Which certainly happened this morning.
The great things about Goldilocks though is that while it can destroy you, it can also be a great confidence builder. Holding pace for 200m and then finding that you can hold it for 300m and 400m is a wonderful feeling and can be a solid confirmation that you threshold pace is improving. That's when it goes well of course.
Today I continued pillaging Coach Paul's brain for information. For instance I have always sort of wondered why two swimmers with seemingly equally good technique may go at different speeds. Is it as simple as one having a better connection to the water and pulling through a bit quicker. Turns out that the answer is yes, more or less. A bit more than that obviously, but pulling through a bit stronger is the crux of it. The conversation made me reaslise that I need to go back into the Swim Smooth Guru and spend some more time reading about the different swim types. I know quite a bit about Smooth swimmers and Swingers, but I need to know more about the Kicktastics, the Bambinos and the Arnies. That can be my job for the weekend.
It won't be my job for tomorrow morning though. My job tomorrow will be to ride out and meet up with some of the Break Your Limits Juniors and go for a spin with them. A gentle spin. My aim will be to avoid repeating Thursday. Should be good though, I am looking forward to it to spending some time with some up and coming triathlon super stars.
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