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It was a bit of a nightmare session today 🙁

I think there were at least seven swimmers including myself in the fast lane, some of them not really going very fast at all and one swimming breaststroke with an incredibly wide wedge kick that almost caught me on the head twice as I tried to avoid them. I wasn’t able to tumble turn on quite a few reps because I had no idea if I was going to stamp on someone, so it was all a bit of a failure.

Tomorrow’s session is also often busy, but whilst the daylight hours are short I’d rather do the later sessions when it’s dark than use daylight time for things that don’t need it.

Sadly I wasn’t surprised when I arrived at the pool today to find that the heating system had broken down again 🙁 The pool temperature had dropped to 27.3°C and was continuing to fall which felt a touch bracing…

Nonetheless, I feel my 50m set was quite successful. I still had one “slow” rep in the first five, but it was one rep later than yesterday, and I still had one failure, but it was two reps later than yesterday, on number 12:

42.25, 42.92, 43.03, 42.75, 42.57, 42.68, 42.24, 41.47, 41.91, 42.14, 41.85, 43.82, skip, 41.56, 42.47, 42.73

The average rep time was only four hundredths slower than yesterday, too.

The downside was that there was nothing left in the tank for my 25m set. I really struggled with these and in fact had three failures, the last being on rep fourteen so I should have stopped there, but I pushed on with the last two and they were ok.

Couple of days off now, and my arms do feel as though they need it 🙂

Another pleasing day at the pool today, at least as far as the 50m reps went.

My target time is currently 43s (or perhaps really 42.99s, as I’d count 43s as a fail) and today I managed:

42.93, 43.25, 42.06, 42.18, 42.17, 42.01, 42.69, 42.10, 42.72, 43.37, skip, 41.68, 42.06, 42.75, 42.11, 41.78

Obviously there’s the 43.25 on rep two that I’d like to get rid of, and I failed on rep ten meaning a skip on eleven, but otherwise more than half the reps were below 42.2 and I’m happy with that.

It did mean that the 25m reps were really quite tough though. I did complete the entire set, but my arms and legs were like jelly by the end and I can’t claim that it was a particularly notable performance.

Well, what a difference a day makes!

Somehow today I found it pretty much impossible to swim my 50m set slowly. It wasn’t perfect as the lane was fairly busy and I had a couple of slow reps where I couldn’t leave the wall or turn as I’d want because other swimmers were in the way, but other than those two, every rep was below my target time. I was very happy with that. I put it down to the slice of treacle tart I ate before I left the house 😀

It did mean that my 25m reps were a serious fight and I did have to skip one of those (and another I didn’t actually time because I wasn’t focused enough to start the watch), but overall I’m very pleased with the performance. Given how long it took me to cope with the previous reduction in time I’ll be very impressed if this step down turns out to be much easier.

Last Sunday was usually busy in the fast lane compared with most. Today I had it to myself 🙂

My body still appears to be adjusting to the shock of dropping my interval time. Performance was better than last time which is pleasing given that I really felt as though I was struggling then, but still nothing to write home about. I guess it will take a while for my brain to get the idea.

I missed out on swimming yesterday as we had an engineer visiting to fix our phone lines (which includes our ADSL internet connection). Largely a waste of time, it would appear, as he left us in no better a situation than when he arrived 🙁

So today was my first day of my new 50m set, having knocked five seconds off the interval time I had previously been using. It was really tough. Not entirely sure why. I felt as though I was struggling for energy as much as anything. I have started to wonder if I perhaps don’t have sufficient easily-accessible energy floating around when I swim immediately after lunch. Perhaps a mid-morning snack might be worth considering. I’m guessing though. Perhaps I was just tired.

Anyhow, after a poor 50m set the 25m set wasn’t really much of an improvement, so I left the pool feeling quite disappointed. Hopefully it will be better on Sunday.