Where am I now?

Over the last few weeks I've swum, run, done circuits, forgotten my weights routine and been seen by 2 physiotherapists. Throughout this I've tended to be a little disappointed with my performance which has a downward drift, especially on the swimming. I've struggled to get back to form after my break due to the tennis elbow and then over Christmas I took a week off due to a skin burn I wanted to heal quickly - swimming pool water didn't seem the ideal environment for it.

Today I did swimming intervals without a pullbuoy and managed to tire myself out before 30 minutes but did achieve a 2:09min/100m pace for a single length. At the end of last week I worked with the Toybuoy and completed a 700m set at a pace of 2:12min/100m with bilateral breathing. So actually that sounds quite positive!

On the running I've noted that I've missed doing a 20km run since November, until this week, so that will have taken away a bit of my endurance training. I've been doing DIY when I might have gone running in a morning so my manual skills will have been refined. Over Christmas I bought some new shoes and on my first run I did intervals on a level road and surprised myself by recording some sprints below 4:20min/km. More of that needed.

OK, so looking back, I'm perhaps being hard on myself and must relate the recent increase in running to a difficulty in swimming.

You can't bring those in here!

Today was the first session of my 8 week programme from Julian and I managed to fit an hour in between two work commitments. I had a problem in that the Cofield pool at the University doesn't allow either fins or hard paddles.

Soft, glove-style paddles are allowed. Julian had told me that council-operated pools usually didn't permit stroke training aids due to 'Health and Safety' concerns but we'd both hoped the University would be more up-to-date in its thinking.

I also enquired at King Edward's pool that is run by a private Trust and they don't allow anything except floats. I'm still waiting to hear from Hathersage, supposedly a triathlon club trains there...

By the way, I did ask before attempting to use the things so I was spared of the embarrassment suggested in the title!

It is widespread panic!

The crazy thing is that such training aids are sold widely often with 'professional' endorsements.

HRV experiments on Android

One day I might  buy an Ambit3 or Fenix3 which include HRV assessment and algorithms to suggest recovery time. Currently I can't commit to such devices as they are costly and yet not really good enough. Suunto are very reliant upon the Moveslink software and there's no Android app available currently and its release date has always slipped away. Garmin have a terrible reputation for unreliability presently and although some online reviews of the Fenix3 are great there still seem to be issues around its logging accuracy. For £400 I'd expect better of both.

However I've entered the heart rate recovery bandwagon for a small outlay using:

• Lepo android app
• A cheap ANT dongle from eBay
• an OTG microUSB B to female USB A converter

which got me started (system is Nexus 7 2012 edition on KitKat) for under £10.

I also had to install 3 pieces of Android software:

• ANT+ Plugins Service
• ANT Radio Service
• ANT USB service

These appear to be activated when the dongle is plugged in and this should be done a few moments before starting the Lepo app. I've run this a few times now and now need to try to understand what the RMSSD figures mean. It is worth noting that the actual RMS value is reportedly transformed 20*ln(RMSSD) to make it more user-friendly.

The concept of HRV is reviewed here and my take on it is that both physiological and psychological stress tend to make the heart beat more regular due to activation of the driving sympathetic nervous system and reduction in the background parasympathetic nerves. Short term (i.e. minutes) recording of R-R intervals can be summarised in RMSSD values although it is clear that this is a gross oversimplification of how heart beats fluctuate.

I don't have a clear plan of how to interpret my own RMSSD values except that I now know they vary between 70 and 100.