Having had a couple of weeks to get my gills wet, today I decided to return to swimming against the clock. Perhaps a bit ambitious, but I made it relatively easy for myself just to get a peg in the, err, ground, planning to swim repeats of 50m in under 60s, starting each rep at a 1’45s interval. As it happens, I swam the first 50 in 47 seconds (which isn’t that far off where I was pre-lockdown) and kept in the 47s and 48s until rep twenty when the tiredness started to creep in and times drifted out to 50 seconds. I finished the session though and every 50 was below 51 seconds, so I was pleased enough with that. Tomorrow I’ll attempt the same set and if I can repeat it successfully then I’ll reduce the repeat interval by five seconds for the next time. Ideally I’d like to see the repeat interval come down to about 70s, meaning I could do, say, twenty-five reps of 50m and then some single lengths flat out for the remainder of the session. I think that will take a fair while though.
I even shared the lane with a swimmer who was just a touch slower than me, but swimming longer reps, and we managed to avoid each other very nicely. Made a pleasant change.