Swimming Longer

Thanks to the work of the coaches and Alex in particular, my stroke has improved beyond all recognition & everything is starting to join up, aided by the work in Mark's yoga classes for improving my core & posture, allowing me to muscles better in the pool. With all this I do feel so much more aware of my own physical body, especially when in the water, how things work together. Sometimes when I'm in the water now, I feel a incredible amount of power waiting to be unleashed , and its actually quite exciting. I do have to rein myself back a little bit, as I'm still not quite there yet, particularly with stamina, but we did 4 x 100 today, with 50 at 200m pace, 25 at just below lactate threshold and 25 at eyewatering max and when I nailed a coupe of the sets correctly, those final 25m felt painful yet utterly amazing!

So yeah, my technique is on a level its never been in my life and still improving, but my swim stamina has slipped badly as I've been focusing so much on technique. In saying that though, tonight was more of a stamina based session and after a couple of bad Tuesday night sessions the last couple of weeks, related in part to eating too much too soon before the session, I did a lot better tonight - no dropped lengths & better pacing (though still room for improvement). All in it was around about the 2000m mark, though obviously with plenty of rests between sets, though some of the rests in amongst the 4 x 200m sets were pushing it a little for me, but really, that's good, because I need to be pushing my swim big time in the next month, getting some longer sustained sets in & getting used to holding steady pace for a much longer time. I also need to be able to judge how fast to swim so I don't burst myself before I'm even on the bike. There are still a few issues around breathing I have, but with the improvements in strength & stamina and being more relaxed in the water, its starting to come better. Open water season is almost there, but this cold May is putting me off trying too much out there, sao I need to be fitting some more lunchtime swims in there too.

As an aside I've now hit the 5000 views mark! Thanks everyone for reading this!

Tonight's blog is brought to you by
Dethklok - Murmaider


Dethklok - Go Into The Water
Dethklok - Awaken 
Crush my Opponents Balls by Skwisgaar 
Luna by Boris (from the Adult Swim album Metal Swim)

In Flames - Swim
Onward to Olympas - Sink or Swim
And finally something very mellow
Devin Townsend - Infinite Ocean