if i were in preparation for a tropical climate race, i'd be delighted with the acclimatizatin currently on offer in unit 3.07. a room packed with servers, no air conditioning or significatnt air flow at the best of times, now that there is scaffolding and tarpaulin across the only windows, is a pretty sweaty environment. i'm feeling hard done by since i have nothing on sitet to go out and 'inpsect' at the moment, either! the tesco metro is doing good business as we are making ever more frequent trips there just to wander around in an air conditioned space...
so, by 5pm i was pretty keen on the monster swim set that i had planned in the lovely open air lido on london fields. who'd have thought - i wasn't the only one!! i battled for an hour in the far-too-narrow lane, focusing on stroke not speed, but with mounting pool rage at the dickheads who insist that they DO belong in the fast lane, despite the fact that after a single turbulent length of freestyle they resort to lop-sided and lethal breast-stroke before joining the gathering in the shallow end. right on the turn-spot. just this mornig gabriel confessed his 'peverse' enjoyment of this challenge - but he is an adrenaline junky ( see him ride through traffic! ) and i just wanted a nice long swim, thinking about my stroke and NOT how to best deliver a kidney punch to a backstroker without being spotted and evicted by the life guards....
long and short of it is that my patience expired just over half way through the set, and i'm frustrated off that now i'm behind on swimming for the week
tomorrow it will be august. how did THAT come around so soon? that means 4 weeks till wisconsin, which means this is the peak of my training. hahaha ha. sure deosn't feel like i've even got it off the ground yet.
so, a few more cheery snippets before i sign off -
on sunday i won the prince bishop triathlon. £75 worth of vouchers for shoes and kit, some decent data collection on the powertap, a good hard training session and a win does deliver a pretty good feeling, despite the relativley low key nature of the event. it also reminded me why i love triathlon so much - such a friendly scene, especially at these smaller events. northeners may talk a bit weird but they really are very genuine and refreshingly friendly people too.
last night wayne, our swim coach stopped me to tell me that the 'front' of my stroke was looking much better, throughout the whole set. he'd been tracking against teh lane ropes and apparently now i only loose about a foot per stroke! that WAS a compliment - he reckons anyting less than a foot backwards and you'r ereally getting there.....thinking about thsi amused me though: 1 foot (0.3m) per stroke - for me that's 20 in 25m - means for every 100m i'm actually swimming 124m - doesn't it? compared to luis, as an example, who takes only 16/length and looses say half a foot and therefor swims only 110m for my 124. No wonder he's faster !!!!
this morning i was cooking on the bike. not had that feeling for a while. 8 hill reps up west hill (a 4:15min (av) climb 2min descent, then met teh boys for a solid hour of 1min flat out/2 min recover. though most of them would get ahead with the initial sprint at the start of each interval, i was consitently catching, and passing them by the end of the minute on most of the reps. Turned it into a bit of a game, actually - really good motivation. whatsmore, i could see that the fellas seemed to be working a lot harder than i felt that i was, and at the end of the hour i did feel that i could have squeezed a few more reps out. Though i was hit by a pretty rapid onset of stomache cramping/ need of toilets by about rep 18 so i wasn't about to suggest it!
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