Friday 1 October 2010

Good news, good swim, great paddle.

Important stuff first. After scaring the begeezus out of us I'm really pleased that my mother's back at home and on the mend. Last week and the start of this week was not good and she's still got a lot of recovering to do but she's now in her own house and getting some decent sleep.

Cycling has been more commuting with most of it being at Olympic bike pace (ish) and I manged to extend my ride on Tuesday evening so that I ended up cycling to Hampton Court before gunning it back home.

Wednesday became swim night. :-) My focus over the next three months is going to be focussed purely on technique, concentrating on the drills that I can execute fairly well. The problem with doing drills on your own is of course, that you cannot actually see what you are doing and therefore it's fairly difficult to be able to correct your errors which is the whole point of doing drills. Somewhat a catch 22. :-/ That is where the club swim sessions will come into play, with the swim coaches there giving me things to work on. To make them easy, I have designed most of my sessions in 100 metre blocks, so for example wednesday's main set looked like this;

4 x 100 as 25 catch up / 25 finger drag / 25 catch up / 25 finger drag

4 x 100 as stroke counting, working on stroke extension (averaging 21 / 22 spl) :-(

4 x 100 as 25 catch up / 25 full stroke / 25 catch up / 25 full stroke

4 x 100 as 25 catch up / 25 finger drag / 25 catch up / 25 finger drag

So lot of short reps without trying to batter myself, although it was getting tough by the end. I was not happy with the stroke counting and should be comfortably down in the 17 / 18 strokes per length but as this is my first session in eight weeks I cannot really moan too much.

It's my catch that needs the most work at the moment. I am not cranking my arm and getting my forearm paddle working so the front part of the stroke is a dead spot, developing very little propulsion.

Running is non-existent. The Luton Marathon will not be happening as my achilles will not take the punishment of a full marathon program but I am hopeful that I will be able to get some halves in before the new year.

Adam and I paddled last night and it was our best one yet, with a strong tempo paddle from Sunbury to Walton and back. A big milestone for Adam in particular as he was feeling really relaxed and the boat was running a lot more smoothly.

It's time to put the Van Nic on the turbo tonight and start working up to some threshold intervals. Nice......

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