Last night I did something I’ve never done before – I quit my first practice. I’m becoming a little frustrated with how long my recovery is taking. It has been three weeks now since I’ve dropped my training efforts to a bare minimum after seeing my performance collapse and I’m not seeing any improvement in my endurance and overall speed. There are bright spots however. My swimming technique this past month continues its slow but steady progress as does my overall feel for the water. I’ve also been working on my flip turns which seems to be laying in a good foundation for further continued improvement later on. Unfortunately my endurance has disappeared and doesn't appear to be returning for the foreseeable future. Wednesday's practice went reasonably well, good enough for me to actually sprint the workout’s last 50 as called for, but the result was over a second slower than what I feel it should have been, even after making allowances for my conditioning. Overall though my technique, especially for backstroke, has been feeling good lately so I had some expectations for this Friday’s workout. I used our warm up last night to continue working on my back, the warm up comprising 3x25 @ 0:40 plus a single 25 @ 0:20, all repeated five times (free in the sprint portion). Right now I’ve been using these short distances to improve my backstroke’s turnover rate and so avoid running into the endurance problem the more typical distances presently pose. Even so warm up turned out to be quite the effort for me towards the end. By the time I had finished the next short set of 100 IMs I knew it wasn’t going to be a good night, and midway through the first rep in the main set I hit the ‘wall’ endurance-wise. I swam for another 700 meters, having Ian lap me twice and sitting out a 50, but when it came to completing a 400 free breathing every five strokes I called it a day. No sense in beating a dead horse. On Sunday I do my body fat measurements and calculate my muscle gain for the quarter, something I’ve been very curious about every since my collapse in the beginning of March. Just what is the impact of all this on my overall conditioning? Stay tuned for the upcoming results.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Leaving Practice Early
Last night I did something I’ve never done before – I quit my first practice. I’m becoming a little frustrated with how long my recovery is taking. It has been three weeks now since I’ve dropped my training efforts to a bare minimum after seeing my performance collapse and I’m not seeing any improvement in my endurance and overall speed. There are bright spots however. My swimming technique this past month continues its slow but steady progress as does my overall feel for the water. I’ve also been working on my flip turns which seems to be laying in a good foundation for further continued improvement later on. Unfortunately my endurance has disappeared and doesn't appear to be returning for the foreseeable future. Wednesday's practice went reasonably well, good enough for me to actually sprint the workout’s last 50 as called for, but the result was over a second slower than what I feel it should have been, even after making allowances for my conditioning. Overall though my technique, especially for backstroke, has been feeling good lately so I had some expectations for this Friday’s workout. I used our warm up last night to continue working on my back, the warm up comprising 3x25 @ 0:40 plus a single 25 @ 0:20, all repeated five times (free in the sprint portion). Right now I’ve been using these short distances to improve my backstroke’s turnover rate and so avoid running into the endurance problem the more typical distances presently pose. Even so warm up turned out to be quite the effort for me towards the end. By the time I had finished the next short set of 100 IMs I knew it wasn’t going to be a good night, and midway through the first rep in the main set I hit the ‘wall’ endurance-wise. I swam for another 700 meters, having Ian lap me twice and sitting out a 50, but when it came to completing a 400 free breathing every five strokes I called it a day. No sense in beating a dead horse. On Sunday I do my body fat measurements and calculate my muscle gain for the quarter, something I’ve been very curious about every since my collapse in the beginning of March. Just what is the impact of all this on my overall conditioning? Stay tuned for the upcoming results.
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1 comment:
You left practice early? Did hell just freeze over?
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