It's been a while since I've been to the pool - looking back, it looks like the last time was December 3 - getting close to three months ago!
I had tried to go a couple times from now until then, but the pool that I go to is used by local HS swim teams, and December and January are the real busy months. Then, I realized that the $40/month I was spending on the membership was not getting used very much anymore, so I cancelled it and went with more of a pay-per-swim type membership. In the course of all this, I came to the conclusion that in all honesty, my swim is about as good as it'll get from here until July - at 45 minutes for 1.5 miles, it is certainly respectable. Sure, with extra work I could probably knock off a couple minutes, but it'd take a lot of time that I'd be better served dedicating to the bike or the run. I also figured that since I've been working on honing form so much over the past year and a half, that I could likely put swimming on the back burner with minimal negative effect. My thinking has been that in June, once the temps in the local ponds and lakes warms up, I can brush off the rust, and likely be back to where I was in December in only a few sessions. It'd also time perfectly with the mileage taper going into IMLP in July - during the time I'm reducing time and mileage on the bike and run, I can put last minute touches on the swim.
However, I didn't want to totally throw all faith into that plan without some idea of whether it'd work - so over the past couple weeks I've been looking for a place to squeeze in a swim session to see how things would go. Today I finally got the chance. Overall I'm really pleased how things turned out. Within a couple laps I was honing in on the things I was working on previously - lower right hand catch, keeping the head down, etc - so I felt like I was pretty much right where I left off. The endurance was lagging slightly, but I think that was partially an effect of starting out too fast - something that is a constant problem as much as I try to slow down. The spread between my fastest lap (the first one) and the lowest lap (near the end) was a full 10 seconds - 42.something to 53.something. Most of the first 20 or so laps were sub-50, then things started creeping up into the 50-51 range until lap 36 or so, and most of the laps after that were 51-52.
Total Distance: 2750 yds
Total Time: 46:03
Avg: 50.25
The three month layoff looks to have been worth a whole 0.07 seconds per lap. Whoop-de-doo!
So, that is great news - because it means that all the time and effort into form that I had put in previously - mile after mile of doing the same thing over and over again, not paying attention to speed or building muscle (which needs to be maintained) is paying off. That all tells me my approach of putting swimming aside (maybe once every couple weeks) for a few months should be viable.
When I got home, I hit the trainer and did the trainerroad Antelope workout. Being a weekend workout, it was 90 minutes instead of the standard 60 minutes, and again it was intervals (5 x 10 minutes) at about ~90% FTP. Rest intervals were 5 minutes, of which I spent 2.5 minutes of each on ILT, alternating between legs in each rest period. I'm really liking the fact that I can get regular ILT in during workouts - I feel I'm finding that to be one of the biggest... improvers of my cycling skills. Not sure 'improvers' is a word - but you know what I mean.
The not-so-great news is that I could start feeling what I think is the IT band again. Most of the intervals were done at a slightly low cadence (80-85) - but the last one I increased it a bit into the low 90's - and felt the IT band less. So it might be that related to degree of power generation on the left leg. I'm not terribly concerned about it - I know I went through a period of a lot of stress with increased volume, double sessions, switching shoes, strength training and an intense race - so there is a lot of ways to back off for a while to see if things settle down. I mentioned in a previous post going back to the Nike Free's for running to see if that helps - but I'm also going to be more adamant about not running two days in a row. I also had dreams of being able to do a long 20-ish mile run twice per month (every other weekend) - but that option may be off the table. While that may, in some ways, have been beneficial - if I have to scratch that approach, I'm actually ok with it. I can still do one of those per month and get much of the same benefit - and in fact once I get to the quality workout phases, the recovery time will be longer between workouts, so doing a long run every other week may have just ended up being way too much anyway. Finally, I'll make sure to do a better job of stretching during the week, and start revisiting the foam roller on a regular basis. It can't hurt - plus my strategy in these kinds of situations is to throw everything possible at the problem to get things straightened out and figure out the details later.
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