Swimming Pain??

With Alice now finding her feet more and more, and with any spare time being at an absolute premium, I have been rethinking my training sessions generally with the aim being to remove the "junk kms" and instead focus my training on useful sessions as opposed to 'just doing it cos I am used to it'. I want to make sure that every session I do is useful and working towards my racing goals.

This all lead me to consider just what use Pain was to my training at the moment. Sure, it is a great social session and one that I really enjoy as it is like nothing else that I do, but as for its actual value in the long term I'm not so sure. With the majority of my racing over the past year focussed more on endurance racing, the faster stuff just isn't what I need at the moment. Sure, I would love to bring my 10km time closer to 40 mins but as for a priority, this has to be the longer stuff. And the swimming.

As an alternative, I have been considering joining up with the Hurts crew as that seems like a more focussed session with longer intervals and a more structured approach and that may be the way forward, but in the short term Pain just isn't cutting the mustard.

As for the swimming, I had promised myself that once I entered IM I would focus some dedicated time to getting this element something like it should be. It has always been my (very) weakest leg and something that means that I am always racing from behind.

And so today, with both Tim and Roly keen for some Pain, I made the unique decision to dump Pain and instead go for a swim. The fact that it was pouring with rain helped the decision, but if I am really to get any better in the water I do need to swim at least 3 times a week. Plus, the rest of the week is looking busy (and rainy) and so there may not be many more opportunities to get to the indoor pool let alone the ocean pool.

Once I got to the pool I decided on the following set:

200m - thumb touch drill
200m - freestyle focussing on the glide and drive from the quads
200m - finger drag drill
200m - freestyle focussing on high elbow
50m - thumb touch drill
50m - finger drag drill
600m - freestyle trying to bring it all together including the full catch on both sides (split into 100m efforts)
100m - warm down

All up 1.6km in just under an hour. Probably longer than I anticipated but it was pouring outside and so I had to wait until the rain had stopped!

I shouldn't say it, but I actually enjoyed it today...and by my reckoning, that's the 8th time I have been in the water in 11 days!