time, time, time...

After my year on research leave, I had forgotten just how much the demands of term time swallow everything else. Consequently, I've been experiencing real problems in getting to the pool regularly, which is really frustrating, as well as making me a bit anxious about my preparations for next summer. I had been trying to get into a routine of eating between 6-7pm, and then going to the gym / pool from 8-10pm, but especially over the last couple of weeks, when essay marking was also added to the mix, I've been working through to 8 or 9pm and have ended up skipping more training sessions than I've made. I makes me realise just how much being on leave helped with my training last year - not that I didn't work while I was on leave, but I had much more control over my time, and could work more evenly across the year without the particular intensities of the academic term.

I love my job (although the current economic climate brings its own unwelcome pressures and concerns), but I love the swimming too....and I think that time spent swimming is an essential way of coping with the demands of work in terms of general health and wellbeing. One of the challenges of both academic work and swim training, though, is that neither of them have an obvious end point; it's hard to know how much is enough / too much, and it's easy to end up feeling like you're doing neither of them properly. I don't know what the answer is, but I could really do with a couple more hours in the day...