I had a better day than yesterday today. Swimming the same set (which is what I’ve settled on having had some time to judge how things were going):
20 x 50m front crawl under 55s on a 75s interval
minimum 5 minutes recovery
16 x 25m front crawl under 22s, on a 45s interval
Timings can be a bit awkward as we’re generally only allowed into the pool area at the time the session is supposed to start, so it’s generally three or four minutes more before I’m in the water and ready to go. I start by swimming the entire first set, which should take 25 minutes and therefore means I finish close to the half hour if the session is supposed to start on the hour, then have a recovery period until twenty minutes to the hour, giving me sufficient time to finish the second set by the end of the session at ten minutes to.
Today I had a single failure in the first set on rep 11, and then the second set was a bit scrappy. I’m still getting used to using the pace clocks at each end of the pool as they aren’t in sync and occasionally I lose my place in terms of what time I should be starting on. I wasn’t too unhappy with it though. What I have noticed is that my swims from the shallow end to the deep end are generally faster than in the other direction. I wonder if that’s because swimming in the shallower water is slower (when starting at the shallow end, a fair bit of the shallow end of the pool is covered underwater after pushing off from the wall).
I had a bit of an altercation with another swimmer today, too. On several occasions I swam over him completely unintentionally. I just had no idea he was there. It couldn’t really be helped. He was swimming at least five seconds a length slower than me and didn’t help by drifting towards the centre of the lane quite often. Anyone, after it had happened a few times he stopped and had a bit of a go about it. I pointed out that I couldn’t actually see him when I was swimming and (slightly more aggressively than necessary, perhaps) he could always swim faster or move to the medium speed lane. He wasn’t very happy about that. During my recovery between sets he stopped to point out that he could at least be considerate and allow another faster swimmer to pass on the turn before realising mid-sentence that it didn’t help his case at all and swam off. I suspect partly it was just that he didn’t like being overtaken at all. Some swimmers are like that: you get alongside them because you’re swimming faster and they speed up once they notice you’re there. He’d done that at least once. Ah well, such is life.