April 2016 Week 2 Session 1

Session 1 has been the long routine in my SwimSmooth programmes and continues to be. Today I managed to loose count, and took the turns at the end of lengths so gently that the Garmin Swim failed to register a handful of lengths. Mentally I felt as though I'd done enough and had been in the water nearly an hour and a half so called it a day. My suspicions were right in that I had done 2 lengths over target. A longest ever swim of 3600m, admittedly nearly all with the pull buoy. In fairness though, the warm up was under 5:20min so working with legs is improving.

I  did try to pace myself well and set off gently, even too slowly I thought, but even so there's a clear drop off in pace with time. From the second half of the middle set I made an effort to work harder and by the end of the fifth set I was 'digging deep'. The fatigue is also apparent in strokes/length, as I've noted before, in that for the first set I averaged 18 strokes per length which progressively increased 19, 20, 21 until the final set again averaged 21 strokes per length. I'm not sure if it's worth noting but in my arm up with legs I was at 22 strokes per length.

Looking back at my data it is clear that since January I can document that I'm now going further and faster with fewer strokes per length.