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I arrived at the pool slightly early today to find it already empty. Normally there’s a school session, but apparently the last one hadn’t turned up so I started ten minutes early with the pool to myself. I did have to share it with a few people, including one parent who repeatedly dragged her baby across my lane whilst encouraging it to kick, but what can you do?

I felt slow today, but by the clock I was doing ok and in the end had my first and only failure on rep twenty-two, a couple more than yesterday and back to where I was on 7th March. Afterwards I did a bit of tumble turn practice in the shallow end. I struggle to avoid hitting the bottom on turns at the shallow end, but I’m getting there slowly.

USRPT distance this year: 69,050m
Total distance this year: 70,900m

Feels like I’ve been swimming this set for a long time, now. Hopefully improvements will continue and I can kill it off and move on soon. It was much quieter at the pool today so much easier to swim, though I did have to politely ask one swimmer who was managing to swim diagonally between the ends of two lane lines if they wouldn’t mind sticking to just the one…

Anyhow, the set was quiet tough, but I did just manage to make nineteen reps before my first and only fail. That being one more than in the previous session I was happy enough with it and hope the good news will continue tomorrow.

USRPT distance this year: 67,300m
Total distance this year: 69,100m

The pool was quite busy today. I had to persuade a couple of pensioners that they’d really be better off the “slow” lane instead of trying to share the only other lane available with myself and another swimmer going about twice as fast as they were. They weren’t best pleased, but common sense prevailed in the end.

I don’t usually swim that well when the pool is crowded because the water becomes very choppy and I didn’t sleep at all well last night, but I can’t really complain about today’s performance, particularly after yesterday’s disaster. I managed eighteen reps before failing just the once on nineteen, though I was a little late setting off on a couple as a result of trying to avoid the other swimmer in the lane. That messed up my next rest interval a bit which in turn made the following rep somewhat harder. Still, I’ve got no complaints given the improvement.

Hopefully I can now continue to improve and we’ll just gloss over Monday’s performance 🙂

USRPT distance this year: 65,550m
Total distance this year: 67,350m

I was back at the pool today with some hope of completing my current set. It soon became painfully obvious however that it just wasn’t going to happen. Right from the start I was struggling. No idea why. I was working very hard, but just couldn’t recover fast enough. Perhaps I didn’t get enough sleep or maybe I’m getting a mild cold or something, but whatever it is my performance was certainly not up to last week’s standard.

In the end I failed on rep twelve and then again on rep eighteen, making it to the end of the set in very ragged fashion. Hopefully things will be better tomorrow.

USRPT distance this year: 63,800m
Total distance this year: 65,600m

Last swim of the week and I was determined to do one more rep than yesterday. I did manage to do just that, but towards the end things were getting quite ragged. These last few reps are proving quite difficult to get through.

Be nice to finish off this set next week if I can though.

USRPT distance this year: 62,100m
Total distance this year: 63,900m

Another repetition of my current set. I felt very sluggish when warming up today. Not that I was particularly tired, but it just felt as though I was swimming through treacle 🙁

It didn’t seem to affect my performance too badly though. This time I managed twenty-one reps before failing on twenty-two and then the last two were a doddle to finish off.

Given a refreshing night’s sleep there’s a chance that I could complete the entire set tomorrow. If I can make twenty-two reps then I’d really feel I needed to push myself just to make two more. At which point I’d have to have a rethink of my current strategy and change the focus of my sets slightly I think. But that’s for another day 🙂

USRPT distance this year: 60,350m
Total distance this year: 62,150m

Yet another repeat of the same set I’ve been doing in the last couple of weeks, but things are progressing slowly so I’m not going to get distressed about that.

Today I managed twenty reps before failing on twenty-one and then finishing off the set relatively easily. That’s one more than yesterday, keeping things moving in the right direction.

USRPT distance this year: 58,600m
Total distance this year: 60,400m

After the disaster of my last session I was determined to do better today and I’m pleased to report that’s how it went. Not a big improvement on my previous best performance, but an improvement nonetheless.

Today I managed nineteen reps before failing on twenty, after which the last four weren’t too hard to finish off. Hopefully I can keep things going tomorrow.

USRPT distance this year: 56,850m
Total distance this year: 58,650m