Back to swimming last night after a little bit of a break, and feeling really good about my progress.
I’ve been swimming at the pool for a month now, and frankly not particularly enjoying it. After the freedom of a nice cool (ok, borderline freezing!) lake, being confined to a 25m pool with the temperature of a hot tub feels claustrophobic at best.
While I’ve maintained my swim distance of 1km, I’ve had to split it into four sets of 250m – 5 laps / 10 lengths. At that point my shoulders have been feeling fatigued. In the lake, I was comfortably swimming 2 sets of 500m, and barely feeling fatigued at all.
There are various possible explanations for why it’s felt harder swimming in a pool, but the bottom line is I’ve not really been enjoying it.
Until tonight.
Somehow, this evening, everything just clicked.
I was early to the pool for a change, which gave me time for a little bit of a warm up before getting into my usual 4 sets. But it’s not as if I did a huge warm-up. I had a few minutes to do some arm circles in the changing room before I got to the pool, which admittedly, is something I’d usually do at the lake, but have not really been doing poolside.
When I got in the water, I also joined the slow line for a lap of mixed breaststroke and sculling. Sculling, in swimming terms, is a figure-of-eight movement made with your arms in the water used as a warm-up. But this was just one lap, so only 50m – hardly enough to really count as a proper warm up. So I’m not convinced it was that.
Anyway, I hit the fast lane and was flying.
The last few swims, I’ve been focusing on bilateral breathing – so breathing on each side. But in a specific rhythm. Breathe to the right on my right arm stroke, then left-right-left and on the left stroke breathe to the left. What I was doing before is breathing every two strokes. So right arm stroke breathe, then stroke left, then right arm stroke breathe again. It’s only an extra stroke but what it does is keep your head down and streamlined just a bit longer.
This is the second time now I’ve managed to maintain that longer rhythm comfortably for the full 1km, but it just felt more natural and easier this time around.
I also must have been resting a bit less between sets, because when I got to the end of my 1km, there was still some time left til the pool was due to close. My shoulders felt fine, so I thought, why not? And promptly banged out another 250m!
My last 250m was as strong as the rest, possibly even my fastest set of the night, so I felt really chuffed with myself.
So that’s my first 1,250m this year! 🙂
At my peak, historically, my training swims would regularly be 1.5km, sometimes longer, obviously when training for longer events, so I’ve really been hoping to gradually push my training distances back to that level. This felt like a real breakthrough – not only swimming bilaterally, but feeling stronger and able to push out another 250m!
You might notice I did “stretch” my swim last time to 1,100m, but that was purely unintentional, and certainly not a result of feeling any stronger. I just lost count!
I feel like this represents a mix of cardio fitness improvement combined with my shoulders adapting, so am now thinking it’s time to push my treadmill running up to the next level – from my 4min run/1 min walk schedule to 5 min run/1 min walk. I’ll give that a try tomorrow and see how it feels.
Possibly I just had the right combination of training and rest and nutrition the last few weeks which has helped me reach this milestone, who knows? But either way for the first time since resorting to pool swimming I found myself enjoying swimming again!
Onwards and upwards!
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