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Another with a very warm pool. No improvement from yesterday at all. Just another slog through the set at a relatively slow pace 🙁

All is not well at the sports centre. Today the pool was far warmer than usual — 31°C according to the lifeguards. That was way too hot to swim hard and all of us in the fast lane struggled to make any kind of pace. It just became a question of doing the best we could, which wasn’t that great at all.

Hopefully things will improve over the course of the week, but I imagine it will take a few days.

I wrote that yesterday’s session felt quite good though I had no concrete way to judge as my stopwatch, err, stopped. Permanently. Fortunately I have a spare (a spare spare in fact, as my son was using my first spare) so was able to use that today.

How little I realised yesterday. Of my 50m reps I had a couple of 42s and one of 43s when I had to avoid another slower swimmer at the turn, but sixteen of the remaining reps were 41s and the last was 39s — the first time I’ve ever been lower than 40s when I’ve done this set.

My reps in my 25m set were still all in the 18s which was a bit disappointing by comparison, but given my earlier performance perhaps that’s to be expected. I’m certainly not at all unhappy. Quite the opposite in fact. Overall it’s my best performance ever.

For whatever reason it was relatively quiet at the pool today. Irritatingly though my Sportcount “Yellow” stopwatch decided to die on me. It was working fine on Tuesday when I last used it. I think water must have found a way in. I wonder if the screws on the back can work loose over time.

I’ve had several of these over the last five years and whilst I object to the fact that they often seem to end up leaking I’ve not found anything as convenient. And in fact Sportcount now do a model targeted at pace training, so I’m going to give that a go.

Anyhow, I did my current set but without reference to a stopwatch. It felt pretty good, but who knows?

The fast lane got a bit hairy today. When we arrived there was already a dad and his two daughters using it, occasionally his son too, the two of us and another lady who arrived a few minutes late. The girls weren’t slow, but they were probably only around ten or eleven years old and often swapped strokes which made them a bit unpredictable and I worried about hitting one of them at the turns.

Despite that my performance was considerably better than many of my recent sessions with most of my 50m reps being 43s, one 42s and two 44s. The slower ones were generally when I had to do an open turn because I wasn’t sure who was where on the wall. The 25m reps were all below 19s and mostly in the low 18s. I can be happy with that for now. Knowing I can do more faster reps I’d like to get back there though.

I found it quite tough to keep the pace up today. I think perhaps all the stuff I was doing at the weekend wore me out a little more than I realised. Initially I couldn’t get my 50m reps below 45s, but over the course of the set they dropped into the 44s and I ended on a 43. The 25m reps were all 18s.

Out of random interest, I took my pulse after the end of my 50m set and then again after the end of my 25m set. It is claimed that a rough guide for maximum heart rate is 220 less one’s age, so mid-160s for me. My heart rate after the 50m set was about 140 (could be a little bit either way as I was counting for 15 seconds and then multiplying up), or about 83% of maximum, which I have to admit surprised me given that I’m maintaining that exercise level for almost 30 minutes. Not quite as much of a shock as measuring a rate of 164 after my 25m set though 😀

At around 18s a length plus the rest interval the 25m set doesn’t take very long — I’d actually attempt more reps but for the fact that I run out of time in the session, but I doubt I could maintain maximum heart rate for that long without my head exploding or something, so I suspect the actual case is that my real maximum heart rate is not as low as the rule of thumb suggests.