Slow week

Well, despite joining a swimming club and also having a nice long 3,600 metres swim on Saturday morning, it's still been a pretty slow week for my training. I only managed to get in 3 workouts with a total of 7,100 metres over the week. A big part of the problem is that my car is off the road for good and so I'm relying on lifts and borrowing a car and buses to get everywhere, which means that I don't have as much ability to squeeze in a trip to the pool between things. Once I get a car sorted I should have a bit more flexability...or at least less of an excuse anyway!

The workouts themselves are going well, I'm finding that I'm a little faster than I was and I'm getting used to timing myself and pushing myself to get a distance done in a particular time. I really enjoyed the longer swim on Saturday too, I think that at least until I start getting into the sea I'm going to try to put in at least one of those per week. And speaking of the sea...I think that I'm going to aim for the Easter holidays to start getting in there...it will still be very cold at that stage but at least it will only be getting warmer from then on!!

Swimming club

Since I started looking into Channel swimming I've had lots of people ask me what club I swam with. And when they heard that I don't swim with a club, their big piece of advice was..."join one"! It's good for making sure that you don't get bored of swimming on your own, it's good for giving you a push...even if you never want to swim competitively...and it's nice to not have to figure out a workout a couple of times a week.

So I went along to the Sunday's Well Master's swimming tonight and really enjoyed it. After swimming on my own the last while it was nice to be in with lots of others who were all doing the same program and not getting in my way!! And it's good to make me realise that there are 3 other strokes out there too!! I HATE backstroke, so I tend to keep away from it and when I swim breaststroke on my own I take it way too easy. And butterfly kills me!!! So this will be a challenge for me to keep up with the others on those strokes.

I can't ever see myself swimming competitively (I'm too slow!!), but I think that I'm really going to enjoy the training. A couple of sessions a week that I don't have to plan myself...lovely!

Rant...

It's been a very busy week, lots going on with college and other things...I still managed to put in a decent number of metres though, a little under my target but I'm happy enough with it for my first week back swimming properly. It's been nice to get back into the pool and push myself...the whole lane swimming thing is driving me crazy already though...I have yet to find a quiet time at the pool that works well for me. It's really annoying when I'm trying to get lengths done in a particular time and people are in the way!! And I'm certainly not a particularly fast swimmer by any means...but I know that and I make sure to let people who are faster than me go ahead of me whenever they catch up with me. Why can't everyone just do that?!! There's nothing more annoying than a person swimming breaststroke slowly up the fast lane and blocking up the whole thing for people who are trying to put in a training session. And I'm finding that my college swimming pool quite often takes over the slow lane for swimming lessons or aqua aerobics so that means that the other two are even busier than usual. Oh well...enough of my rant, I guess I just need to find a quieter time in the day to put in my lengths. A task for this week!

Back to normality

Christmas is over, it's 2008, I'm back to college and Thor has gone home. So now it's time to really get into a routine where I'm managing to put in a decent amount of metres in every week. I put in a couple of short sessions this week but no hard training. I need to put together at least a couple of weeks worth of training programmes so that I'm not doing the same thing over and over again each session.

I'm adding a list at the bottom of the blog for each week and the number of metres that I've done that week (my goal is about 10,000 metres a week at the moment) so that I'm more motivated to keep up the training...having to admit publically that I've had a lazy week is good motivation for not having one!