Lonely?

Down the pool this morning, but for the first time in a few months I wasn't actually down at Claremont Pool with SwimSmooth, rather I was down at this particularly spectacular pool.

Another new development compared to the last few months was that I actually got in the water too!!!

This pool  is my local pool at Bicton Baths and it is now firmly my favourite pool in Perth. I mean look at that view.

On top of the view look at how busy the pool is, this photo was taken at about 6:50am, so hardly at a quiet time. I will admit it had busier 10 minutes before, but still, not that much busier. How good is it? Plus the pool is two minutes walk from my house and they serve coffee from the front desk. The list of positives is a very long one indeed.

Downsides? Well the pool is only 33m long and the lane ropes are a little rudimentary. Ummm, beyond that, well l I guess you might get lonely... Hmmm,

Anyway, nice pool.

So what was I doing there?

Well as I wrote last night I was actually doing a little bit of coaching, plus as I said above I even went for a swim.

The coaching bit was helping out a mate who is keen to increase his speed in the water. Last night I wrote about the inclusion of sprint sessions in a triathlon program and that I wouldn't usually do much of that. However, as I also wrote last night, this particular mates swim volume and swim goals mean that a bit of high intensity training is perhaps not a bad idea.

For this particular session the high intensity work took the form of 15 x 100m with the 100s having an increasing proportion of high intensity as they progressed. For the first 5 the middle 33m was fast, for the next 5 the last 66m was fast and for the last 5 the entire 100m was fast. These 100s also had an increasing amount of rest so that by the last 5 there was a full 30 seconds recovery in between the 100s. Plenty of recovery meaning that the efforts could be at a proper high intensity. I got the impression that the session hurt. Which is kind of the point.

Still, I am confident that with that pain will also benefit. Combined with the other work my mate is doing, this sort of session will help him achieve his swimming goals.

For myself I wasn't working nearly so hard in the water. I decided to jump into the pool because quite frankly it makes it easier to watch what somebody is doing underwater. I didn't do much, but I still ended up rolling through 1000m or so of swimming. Doesn't sound like much, but it is the furthest I have swum since February.

On the coaching side I learnt some things too. One thing I learnt is how much easier it is coaching one person rather than a squad. It sounds obvious, but I haven't really done that before. With a squad you are so busy running the session that it is hard to actually coach individuals. With one person you have nothing but time, you can really watch a person and contribute. It was a good lesson in the strengths and weaknesses of small squads vs big squads

Today was only a first step and it was a small one, but still the step was an important one. Hopefully it is just the first of a number of steps to come.