Open water vs pool sessions: throughout April and May, as the water gets warmer the lake is the best place to be but there is still definite value to be had with a focused pool session once a week. I still need coaching from time to time as I am far from a perfect swimmer, and I always want to improve. So I decided to put some of my trust into another coach and join a coached tri session once a week. At these club sessions, all those drills and training sessions that I tell my swimmers to do, well someone else is telling me to do them and I do as I am told. And hey presto it’s starting to help and I am seeing some improvements. To fit this into my weekly training sessions, I have a 4:50 am wake-up call to be in the pool for 6 am. My husband at this point confirms again that he thinks I am nuts, but luckily for me supports me and helps with the hectic school mornings while I swim.
I chose 2 training “events” to give my training programme some structure: The Her Spirit Summer Solstice 10km swim and Chill Swim Ullswater end to end, which is 7.5 miles.
Having a focus helped me put the distance and the summer plan into some kind of order. By doing these events, I could break my training down into sections: the first thing I was training for was a 10k.
The 10k was in June and I was only really hitting the water in May. I was building up the distance gradually but really felt like I need to hurry my ass up and get some distance under my belt. I tried to adopt the no more than 10% rise in distance over a week to avoid and overuse injuries, but I have to admit I did jump into a 5km training swim that I wasn’t really ready for and boy I did pay for it.
I got a really bad cramp, the kind of cramp that lasts for a few days and which felt like I had a brick in my calf kind of cramp. I completed the swim, but was dehydrated and under-fueled. This is everything I would advise my clients against. Hydration and recovery are the key but I’d failed on this swim and paid the price. To make things even worse, my watch failed to track the distance due to GPS issues, meaning, it didn’t even record on Strava. Maybe that means I just needed to forget it and move on. And besides – if a swim isn’t recorded, did it even happen?
Since the Marathon & my epic cycling trip, I’d also had a couple of weeks of a few more beers than normal and my diet wasn’t as it should be. After the 5km, I knew it was time to get back on track. I’d run out of Tailwind, which is what I drink on long training days as it’s full of all the carbs & nutrients needed and I also needed to look at my recovery fuel.
I made the switch back to non-alcoholic beer. I’m not a huge drinker anyway, and I am by no way preaching it’s all individual choice, but for me personally I feel better when I cut it out and just have the odd treat drink. It’s so much better for my recovery sleep and overall hydration.
So following the not-so-good 5km swim, I settled into regularly swimming 4 times a week, usually one of those swims in the pool. I gradually increased the weekly overall distance. So to check I was ready for the 10km event, I scheduled an 8k swim. Armed with my swimming buddy, tow float with a bottle of Tailwind and some energy chews, off we go on a sunny weekend morning with the promise of cake at the end. This swim went ok all things considered, I was very ready to get out at the end but it wasn’t so bad. My family did think I’d left home as with travelling, swimming and cake eating the day was virtually gone. This quickly made me realise I would have to be creative about how I fit in these very long swims.
I decided slightly shorter but back-to-back swims would be the next way forward, three days of swimming aiming to cover the whole distance I was training for. This was still very time-consuming but more family and work-life-friendly.