Injury Time is Almost Over!

I guess I've been pretty lucky up until now on the injury front, especially with the distances that I've been doing in the pool. Unfortunately my luck has run out this past week. My shoulder that's been a little sore on and off the past few months decided to really start complaining last week. On Thursday it was quite sore, but Friday was the real decider-it was very painful to swim and didn't get any better as I warmed up. Time to rest it.

So I've been going to physio the past week and I've done no swimming, which felt very strange (as well as frustrating). But thankfully the break seems to be doing it good-I'm going to be easing back into it after the weekend. I can't wait!! I just have to be very careful now that I don't do too much too soon and end up back where I was. But hopefully the worst is over :)

So now the fun starts-I'm in the sea full-time from Monday onwards. All along I'd been really looking forward to this but I was really hoping that the water would have warmed up a bit by now! But I'm not going to be able to do huge distances next week anyway with my shoulder still recovering so it's a perfect time to start increasing my time in the cold water. Hopefully by the time I'm doing slightly longer stuff we'll have had some warmer weather (although I won't hold my breath!). And regardless of the temperature, it means that I have no tumble turns, no chlorine, no blue lines, no people in the way from now on. And that can only be a good thing!

Doubling Up...

It was a really great weekend's swimming. The Spike Island swim was happening Sunday. So on Saturday I took it easy, a nice short pool session to stretch out after all the week's metres.

Sunday arrived bright and sunny to my delight :) We met in Cobh town and changed and got ourselves ready to go. I'm sure that people passing us were thinking that we were totally mad...but what's new?! We got into the water around 11:30, high tide was around 1pm so we were hoping to get a push from the tide at the end.

The temperature felt great, around 11deg C, about a degree warmer than Sandycove (which seems to be the coldest of the local swimming spots at the moment!!!). We had our instructions as to where to get our bearings from so off we went, Danny and David with a rib and myself and Imelda with the boat. It seemed like no time had passed by the time we reached the island, although it took us about half an hour. From that I was figuring that we should be done in just over an hour and a half. 

As we swam along the back of the island the water temperature dropped considerably and I started getting cold. Then we turned the corner to head back towards Cobh and it got very choppy. At this stage I was counting down the minutes-I was still cold and that was making me tired and the choppy water was annoying me. I figured that we had about a half an hour left at the most. Boy was I wrong! 

We were taking our bearings off the Cathedral spire, and for ages it didn't seem to be getting any closer. What was actually happening was that the tide had turned so we were fighting the river and the tide, so we were getting closer but at a very slow pace. We realised this when we had to stop to let a ship pass. While we were stopped we felt ourselves drifting like crazy away from the town. So for the rest of the swim we were swimming back upriver towards our starting point. It felt like we were going in slow motion or something, we were passing the buildings SO slowly. And all this time I was miserable-I had never heated up after the temperature drop earlier and I just wanted to be out of there. But there was no way that I was getting on that boat!!

In the end it took us 2hours and 35minutes to complete the swim. Over double the length of my longest sea swim up until then! I didn't appreciate it at the time, but now it feels great to know that I can do that long in 11deg C. And I wasn't even that cold after-I shivered a bit but warmed up fast. I've been a lot worse! It was a really successful swim and I'm really happy now that we had to fight hard to complete it, no point in making training easy! 

Monday was a bank holiday, so I decided to go down to Sandycove...the plan was to do three laps and I had company for all of them so all was good. What I didn't factor in was a very cold wind and how tired I was from the day before. After the first lap I was cold and decided that two was enough. No point in torturing myself on my day off! As it turned out noone ended up going around again anyway. Although I'd been hoping for more, I was very happy with what I'd done, especially after the day before. A good weekend's swimming all round :)

So now we're into the next week and I have a bit of an easy week...yesterday was the first day in ages that I didn't feel stiff at all after the three low mileage days in a row, it felt really strange! And today I had one horrible session and came back later after college and did a great one, funny how that goes. Lets hope the rest of the week goes well.

On the fundraising side of things, I got some more sponsorship this week from my fantastic Connecticut cousins, thanks guys :) It's great to see the money coming in. Jack and Jill have also put a profile of me on their website which is cool, it's great to see them getting involved and publicising the swim. Don't forget, if you want to sponsor me, you can do it here. Thanks!

It's the weekend :)

So my latest facebook status reads..."Lisa  can't figure out where the week went...but who cares, it's the weekend!". And it's so true. This week has just totally flown by in a blur of pool-Sandycove-eating-sleeping. It's another long week metres-wise so my plan (knowing that this is a long weekend and I wouldn't want to be spending it in the pool!) was to get as much done as I could early in the week so that then I could have a bit of a break over the weekend. And the tides earlier on this week were evening tides too, so not only was I doing a lot in the pool, but I was then trying to get a trip to the sea in later on too. So I did have a couple of days this week where I literally spent the whole day training, eating, and traveling. So now I'm absolutely wrecked after the week. BUT...it means that I practically have the weekend off!! Yesterday was just a short one, I'm meeting someone today for a short pool swim, I've got the Spike swim tomorrow (postponed after horrible weather last weekend) and the plan is to do a double in Sandycove on Monday. All nice, easy, short stuff! Yay for time off! Of course I've got the million other things that I should have been doing all week to catch up on instead...

It didn't feel like a great week training-wise. Nothing like last week anyway. But it tends to go like that I find....for every really good week there are a few bad ones. With the two long weeks in a row I was quite tired this week, and that wasn't helped by the fact that I was trying to squash everything into four days either. And that meant a lot of arguing with myself about why I should stay in the pool and get stuff done rather than just leaving it til tomorrow...when of course I won't feel like doing it either tomorrow! But it was worth all the tiredness to have a few nice easy days now.

I really am getting sick of the pool-I can't wait to be in the sea full-time! It's now May, so officially 'summer-time'...although Irish seasons don't necessarily follow this-in fact, they almost never do! I am starting to get more time in the open water since it came up to 10deg C. However, this past week we've had some cold weather again, and unfortunately it seems to have ruined the progress that the sea had made....both Monday and Tuesday evenings felt very cold in Sandycove, colder than it had been for a few weeks. So lets hope for good weather coming back in to heat things up again. The sooner it warms up, the sooner I can get out of the pool, and I'm SO looking forward to that!