Waiting for the open water season to start

Well, it's not been a great week, swimming wise. I've been feeling a bit demotivated - for several reasons, I think: because I'd been focusing on the 6 hour swim, and now that's done I've not got a clear short / medium term goal; because I got a bit overtired which made the training feel more like a chore; because I've not been eating as well as I should; and finally, because I'm not wild about being back in the pool after all of that fantastic sea swimming in Malta. But, the lakes where I train here in the Midlands are opening up at the beginning of May, and the racing season isn't far off. So my tasks for the next couple of weeks are to eat properly, get to bed a bit earlier, and identify which events I'm going to do this summer. I'll add the races to the blog shortly. This should give it all a bit more structure.

For the first time in ages, I missed the 5.30am training on Tuesday - my alarm went off, but I didn't make it out of bed and went straight back to sleep. To be honest, I had such a nice warm sleep that I couldn't even bring myself to regret missing the swim. But then I missed Wednesday night as well for no reeason in particular, so I decided that I absolutely had to go tonight. We did some technical stuff, then various sprints - I'm not good at these and find it quite frustrating that I quickly start to drift behind the others. But my coach, Robin, insists (quite rightly - I'm just being weedy) that I need to get my long-distance pace up and there's only one way to do that - speed work. I accept the principle, but it's not a form of suffering that I find easy to enjoy. I suggested that we could try swimming a long way slowly instead, since I can do that, but he wasn't persuaded.