Off to the pool this afternoon for another attempt at my latest set:
- 400m f/c warm-up
- 24 x 50m f/c, target 51s, turnaround 75s
- 200m swim down
I was first into the pool because there was a school session beforehand, but more swimmers than usual turned up whilst I was warming up and it started to get a little busy. I ended up stuck between two swimmers who were both making quite large bow waves and the water became a bit choppy, which isn’t something I enjoy.
Then about halfway through my set someone joined in next to me, splitting the two lanes (there were no lane ropes in today) swimming breaststroke. I don’t really mind people swimming that close as I don’t take up a lot of room myself, but she just didn’t appear to be able to swim parallel to the side of the pool. She might start from the shallow end perhaps a metre and a half from me, but by the time she’d reached the deep end she was swimming down the lane line I was using. This isn’t a great situation to be in when swimming front crawl 🙁
Fortunately the swimmer the other side of me left fairly soon after and she moved into their position, but not before we’d had a few near misses, one before I’d even breathed after coming off the wall in the turn. Hey ho 🙁
Anyhow, the set… It went much better today than on Friday. Despite the near misses I managed to complete nineteen reps before failing on twenty and then finished off the last few reps in the set without failing again. It would be nice if that means I can complete the set next time, but I’m probably at the point of going as fast as I’ve ever managed now, so perhaps I can’t expect progress to be too fast.
Talking of progressing, I think from here on in I’m going to drop the target time by half a second each time I complete a set unless I’m clearly managing it easily. At the moment it feels like a more realistic target, rather than knocking off an entire second and having a large number of failures.
USRPT distance this year: 83,150m
Total distance this year: 85,700m