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I had a better day than yesterday today. Swimming the same set (which is what I’ve settled on having had some time to judge how things were going):

20 x 50m front crawl under 55s on a 75s interval
minimum 5 minutes recovery
16 x 25m front crawl under 22s, on a 45s interval

Timings can be a bit awkward as we’re generally only allowed into the pool area at the time the session is supposed to start, so it’s generally three or four minutes more before I’m in the water and ready to go. I start by swimming the entire first set, which should take 25 minutes and therefore means I finish close to the half hour if the session is supposed to start on the hour, then have a recovery period until twenty minutes to the hour, giving me sufficient time to finish the second set by the end of the session at ten minutes to.

Today I had a single failure in the first set on rep 11, and then the second set was a bit scrappy. I’m still getting used to using the pace clocks at each end of the pool as they aren’t in sync and occasionally I lose my place in terms of what time I should be starting on. I wasn’t too unhappy with it though. What I have noticed is that my swims from the shallow end to the deep end are generally faster than in the other direction. I wonder if that’s because swimming in the shallower water is slower (when starting at the shallow end, a fair bit of the shallow end of the pool is covered underwater after pushing off from the wall).

I had a bit of an altercation with another swimmer today, too. On several occasions I swam over him completely unintentionally. I just had no idea he was there. It couldn’t really be helped. He was swimming at least five seconds a length slower than me and didn’t help by drifting towards the centre of the lane quite often. Anyone, after it had happened a few times he stopped and had a bit of a go about it. I pointed out that I couldn’t actually see him when I was swimming and (slightly more aggressively than necessary, perhaps) he could always swim faster or move to the medium speed lane. He wasn’t very happy about that. During my recovery between sets he stopped to point out that he could at least be considerate and allow another faster swimmer to pass on the turn before realising mid-sentence that it didn’t help his case at all and swam off. I suspect partly it was just that he didn’t like being overtaken at all. Some swimmers are like that: you get alongside them because you’re swimming faster and they speed up once they notice you’re there. He’d done that at least once. Ah well, such is life.

Not a happy swimming day today. I was attempting the same set as last Friday, but really struggled with the 50s and didn’t do too well with the 25s either. My daughter appears to be developing a cold, so I’m wondering if perhaps I have it too, but my body hasn’t realised yet. My throat does feel a little rough this evening, but I’ve spent much of the last three weeks talking in presentations so that could easily be the cause as I’m really not used to it.

I’ll see how things go tomorrow.

My vague plan for today was to change my set around and attempt:

20 x 50m front crawl no slower than 55s on a 75s interval
some sort of recovery
16 x 25m front crawl aiming for somewhere around 20s, on a 45s interval

I had no idea if 20s would be achievable, so the second set was a bit of an experiment.

Generally the first set went pretty well, though it didn’t help when someone decided they were going to join my lane and swim much slower than the pace the rest of us were doing. I let him have a 15s head start at one point and still caught up with him at the end of the length. Eventually he caught on to the fact that he really shouldn’t be there, but it took a fair while. In the end I managed to get all the way through the set without a failure, though I had to skip a couple of tumble turns to avoid this swimmer.

I took a couple of minutes without swimming to recover and then had a gentle pootle up and down the pool to give myself a total of around five to six minutes break before starting on the 25s. I messed a few up at the start as I didn’t realise that the pace clocks at either end of the pool are not synchronised. Once I’d worked out what times I needed to leave the wall on each clock I was sorted, but I lost track of how many 25s I actually swam. All but one were faster than 21s, so I’ll take that as a marker for now. I did have to skip two reps. Next time I swim I’ll count the reps more carefully and see if I can’t get a longer rest between the sets which will hopefully help.

I had a pleasantly uneventful drive to and from the pool today. My target was to repeat Tuesday’s performance and swim reps of 50m in under 55s, leaving the wall every 80 seconds. It wasn’t easy and I felt a bit lacking in energy, but I kept up the pace and managed to keep going right to the end. Very pleased with that, though for some strange reason my legs feel quite tired now. Must be pushing off the wall in the turns, I think.

So, I’m going to have to think of something new to do tomorrow. I could just switch to leaving the wall every 1’15s and try to get the swim time gradually faster, but I’d like to do some more sprint work, so I might do 24 reps of 50m leaving the wall every 1’15s, then have a bit of a rest — perhaps pootle up and down a few lengths of kick with a float, and finish off with 16 reps of 25m leaving the wall every 45s. I reckon I should be able to make 20s for each length but without trying it I really don’t know. It’ll certainly scare the bejaysus out of anyone in the fast lane taking 40s a length 😀

Cracking drive to and from the pool today. On turning down my usual cut-through to avoid the closed bridge I came up behind a flat-bed truck that was reversing down the lane because it had met another truck coming the other way and there was nowhere to pass. By the time they’d actually found somewhere suitable to pass there were loads of cars queued up in either direction and it was all very jolly. Then on the way home on a section of road that is probably impossible to avoid if you need to get into the town from the north, I ended up stopped behind a scaffolding truck, two cars and, at the front, another large flatbed truck, though it appeared to be trying to get into the gateway of a field. Meanwhile cars were pulling up behind me around a sequence of blind bends. Eventually the flatbed started reversing towards us and we all had to reverse around the bends (I was relieved not to be at the back) so it could reach a place where there was space for something coming the other way to pass it. That “something” turned out to be a flatbed articulated lorry with a large trailer in tow. I really must grab the video off my dashcam for that one.

Anyhow, I was just in time for the start of the pool session, but to my surprise there were far more people than usual. I ended up sharing the fast lane with four triathletes, judging by their swim hats. I don’t know what it is about triathletes, but get a bunch of them together and they seem to turn the pool into something resembling a major Atlantic storm. Despite being bounced up and down by the waves and getting a faceful of water every few lengths when I was breathing, things were actually going pretty well. At least until I got into the high twenties of reps I was an easy two seconds a rep faster than yesterday and whilst the last two reps were a bit of a fight I managed to get through the entire session without needing to skip a rep. I was tired, but not as tired as I was last Friday. So, very pleased overall with the result. I’ve no idea why I should have been so much quicker than yesterday though. I did draft one of the other swimmers a couple of times having caught up with him, but that doesn’t explain the improvement over all the reps.

Hopefully I can repeat the performance on Thursday, without the added sea-sickness 😀 I’m not sure where I go from there though. I might reduce the rest interval again and then try to push down the swimming time as well, doing fewer reps but adding a second set of 25m sprints aiming for a time of about 20s and gradually work to bring that down as well. That would be pretty much back where I was in February and I’d be exceptionally happy with that after little more than two months back in the water.