I know that you are all waiting to hear about how I pulled up from my walk the other day. The answer is a little tight. I was surprised how tight I was in my calves and in my actual feet especially seen as though it was only a light walk. From the tightness in my feet I can see why you need to do the strengthening exercises before going out and running in them for the first time, that would be complete madness and you could do some serious damage!! So still no run a this stage but the continuation of the exercises will be a focus for the remaining week before a light run on the weekend.
With regards to training, today was a swim day and what a session it was. The set included a 400 warm up including backstroke, freestyle and breaststroke followed by another 400 of kicking including backstroke and freestyle. We then moved to the main set which was called the 'Lactic Set'. You know it is not good when the name of the set refers to the bi product of what is about to happen to your muscles...
The set started with 6 X 25 metre sprints @ 30 seconds. Basically that means that you sprint to the other end of the pool and on the 30 second mark you sprint back again for 6 repetitions. It normally takes 20 seconds to get to the end of a 25 metre pool at sprint space so you have around 10 seconds to recover.
With no stop from the 25 metre sprints you go straight into 6 X 50 metre sprints @ 55 seconds. You have just doubled your length of the sprint but reduced your time by 5 seconds.
Move into 6 X 75 metre sprints @ 85 seconds. You are now sprinting longer but have 30 seconds for the last 25.
Lastly 4 X 100 metre sprints @ 1 minute 55 seconds. Again, you have put another 25 metres on your distance and are sprinting longer.
Once that was complete (the 4 X 100 metres), you went back down again doing 6 X 75's again followed by 6 X 50's then 6 X 25's.
For those of you that swim, you would know the advantages of drafting and swapping the lead around. This was all good for the first set (moving up to the 4 X 100's) but coming back down I was in front leading half my lane (we split the group and started from opposite ends) and that is where I stayed until the finish. The new guy in the lane was gone before we finished the 6 X25's and just to cool ourselves down after all that we finished with a 200 freestyle and backstroke
Swimming is feeling good at the moment however I will tell reveal to you a fear that I have of open water swimming. It started when I thought I could swim before my first triathlon. I was in the front row of swimmers about to jump into the water when the gun went off. It was all well and good and I think I was leading the swim for a small period until the faster swimmers started coming over the top of me...literally! I remember swimming to the side and looking at my heart rate monitor which was showing 200 bpm...that is a little high! Since then I have had mini panic attacks at the start of a triathlon swim and this is something that I aim to try and get over in the next couple of months.
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