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A repeat of yesterday’s USRPT set today, though only 400m for the warm-up as I was getting a little tight on time otherwise:

400m front crawl warm-up
25 x 50m front crawl, target time 60s, rest interval 25s
200m front crawl swim down

Today I managed the entire set without failing. Actually I was hitting around 50s for the 50m swims which makes the rest interval a little long, but I think I need to work my way back down to the shorter rest interval at the moment. Certainly my heart rate was still high and my breathing still deep when I started on the next 50.

I think I’m going to set a rule that I need to complete a set without failing three consecutive times before I reduce the target time or the rest interval. Assuming I do this over the next couple of days then I’ll probably reduce the rest interval to 20s and then the next step will be to reduce the target time to 55s and we’ll see how it goes from there.

Last swim of the month, this. Not an impressive total for the month, not even compared to last January when I managed 32.2km. I’m not really expecting a huge increase (if any) over last year, but it would at least be nice to be somewhere close. Not that USRPT sets are about distance, but I’d still like to think I can cover around the same kind of distance as I was doing last year with the new 2018 regime. I reckon once I get the hang of things in an hour and a half there should really be time for a warm-up, a 25 x 50m set, recovery set, 30 x 25m set in a different stroke and swim down with some to spare, which is a decent distance each day. If I stick to 50s for front crawl and do a 25m set in backstroke or breaststroke (or stick to two 25m sets if I want to do shorter front crawl work) that should work until I feel up to doing a 50m set in backstroke or breaststroke.

USRPT distance this year: 2,400m
Total distance this year: 19,500m

Had to skip Monday. The cellar is being tanked out and split into several rooms and I needed to be around to sort out some details with the builder. More of that in another post or several.

Today I managed to start what I planned to do at the beginning of the month. That is, switch to swimming USRPT sessions instead of longer, slower distances, though given how far I’ve been knocked back by being ill I still had to make things quite easy so I can find a suitable starting point. Today my session was:

500m front crawl warm-up
25 x 50m front crawl, target time 60s, rest interval 25s
200m front crawl swim down

Ended up having to skip two 50s early on (numbers 6 and 8), but did ok from there.

USRPT distance this year: 1,150m
Total distance this year: 17,650m