The Frogman of Ironmonger Row

This morning saw me at the swimming pool at the crack of dawn again - or at least I think it was the crack of dawn as it was so foggy that I wasn't entirely sure whether dawn had broken.  The pool was quite busy this morning and I hadn't gone very far when I spied my freediving frogman friend at the bottom of the pool again.  This time, he was moving so, although he made me jump (not literally, it's quite difficult to jump when your feet are surrounded only by water), I wasn't concerned for his safety.  However, he managed to make me jump another six times during my swim by suddenly appearing far beneath me.

Many ticks

This morning's session was similar to Tuesday's in that there was a four length warm up (which I did as four actual lengths of the 30.5m pool without any scaling), a 16 length main session (which I'll talk about shortly) and a two length cool down (also done as two actual lengths without scaling.  The main session involved scaling issues because it was supposed to be 16 x 25m done as 4 x two lengths (i.e. not stopping after one length but having a short break after two) and 8 x one length (with a short break after each length).  As discussed in my previous swimming post, in order to not break myself by overtraining at this early stage, and given that I'm working to a sprint distance training plan rather than a super sprint one and swimming the actual number of lengths prescribed in a 30.5m pool instead of a 25m pool would result in many extra metres of swimming, I'm having to scale the number of lengths so as to get as near to the distance and tasks included in the plan as I can within the confines of an oddly calibrated body of water.  Therefore, having realised that today's session was all about joining up the lengths I'd already mastered on Tuesday, I scaled the session to be 4 x 60m and then 6 x 30m.  This made my total swim distance today (with the warm-up and cool-down) 600m, meaning I've swum 1.2km in total so far.

Now onto the exciting part.  As the pool was so busy, especially the slow lane, I found myself struggling, even in my warm-up, just to do a length of breaststroke without bashing into people and having to overtake very swiftly to avoid crashing into people coming the other way while I did so.  Even though I struggled to maintain form after a few lengths on Tuesday, I knew that my crawl was significantly faster than my breaststroke and I wouldn't be able to do my session properly in the traffic I was dealing with.  Therefore, I had two choices - abandon the session and just pootle up and down doing breaststroke, or move to the medium lane!  I took a look around and saw that the nearer of the medium lanes had only three people in it and figured I could give it a go and see what happened.  I could always retreat to the safety of the slow lane if I embarrassed myself with my over-inflated ideas of how fast I was.  So, off I went to the medium lane, for the first time ever, and started swimming my first two lengths of crawl.  It was all fine.  In fact, on the third set of two lengths, I realised that I had just overtaken a man swimming in the fast lane, although I thought that moving up to the medium lane was plenty for one day.  I did the whole of my main set of lengths in the medium lane, before moving back to the slow lane for my cool-down.

Possibly the world's most silly
swimming injury

The other exciting (that's not the right word really) thing that happened in the pool was that I got my fist injury of this training campaign.  It must be pretty difficult to injure oneself swimming, but I did just that.  The medium lane is half the width of the slow lane - or, rather, the medium lane is only one lane width, whereas the slow lane is two, plus the extra little bit to account for a gap between the last lane and the side of the pool.  Therefore, it can be a bit of a tight squeeze going up and down the pool in the medium lane, especially if one person is doing breaststroke (thereby making them wider as they kick their legs out).  As a result of this, I was very much aware of keeping to my side of the lane, so as to avoid upsetting anyone, but this proved to be my downfall - as I was putting my arm into the water on a stroke, I clipped the lane rope with my forearm.  It stung a tiny bit when I did it, but then I noticed once I'd got to work that I had quite a mark where I'd hit my arm.  Now there is a mark, but no pain, which has to be a good outcome in the circumstances.

Tomorrow is a running day.  It's also a netball match day.  I haven't quite figured out how these two things are going to interrelate yet.