Making progress

It's exam marking season at work, so swimming has been a glorious relief from the piles of exam scripts - especially because of the beautiful weather. Last Thursday, I'd been marking all day and was feeling stiff and grouchy, so went up to Bosworth for an evening swim. By 8.30pm (the end of the session), the sun was setting, and the water was completely flat and still - just beautiful to swim in.

Saturday morning was equally lovely, although the lake was really busy, mostly with wetsuited triathletes. It's fun when it's like that, but what I really like is to be on my own (or feel like I'm on my own) in the water. I love the peace of just swimming, and there's always a really nice 20 minutes or so towards the end of the session when most people have got out and you can just swim without thinking about anything at all. This tendency to just pootle happily along is, of course, why I'm not a fast swimmer, and in training terms, it's probably not a very efficient use of my time, but I always feel so happy afterwards that I don't really care. After swimming, I was standing around chatting with tri club friends, and we suddenly noticed that lots of huge fish (carp?) were milling around the boat slip and jetty. To be honest, I prefer a strategy of denial about any wildlife in any water that I swim in, so don't really want to see them, but still...they're really beautiful:

Even if my open water swims are a bit on the ploddy side, Robin is still putting us through our paces in the pool. On Tuesday morning, we did 35 x 100, with 15 of them at max, interspersed throughout the set. All of my times hovered between 1.32 and 1.35 for the max 100's, which I know isn't fast by many people's standards, but is a definite improvement for me. Even so, I find it completely infuriating that I can't get below 1.30, no matter how hard I try.... yet.

But my distances are creeping up, I'm injury free (so far so good) and I'm really enjoying the swimming. I'm about to start doing some racing and longer training swims in the next few weeks, which should step things up another notch.