Just about sneaking a couple more Janathon sessions in!
I must admit, it's been a bit difficult over the last week or so. Snow-inflicted inactivity has stalled me in all sorts of directions. The desire to lose some weight leads to misery more often than not - sometimes I think weighing and measuring is the road to madness for me. It certainly leads to what I now recognise as "bad head stuff", anyway, which used to express itself as both low mood and a tendency to defiantly over-eat (as in "well, I'm never going to shift it, I may as well snarf down the entire bar of chocolate right now SO THERE!"). Since I more or less have the defiance under control, I'm left with low mood, which isn't a great mindset before a Masters session.
Sunday was a big pile of epic failbeans, then - I woke up fluey, poor progress with weight/measurement loss led to low mood and I wasn't hungry at lunchtime so didn't eat very much; certainly under 500cal all day. There were loads of new starters at Masters, which usually I welcome - there's nothing like sharing your enthusiasm with new people! - but it did lead to some fairly congested and cluttered lanes as everyone tried to sort out their speeds. Katie moved me up to Lane 3 (Lane 4 is the super-speedy types!) along with a few of the other folks I'd been lanemates with last year, but my attention was shot. I could barely wrap my head around what we were doing, let alone keep up. After a trying hour I bailed - it was obvious I wasn't in a good place mentally or physically. The coaches were both very sweet, though - I am dubious as to whether I'm ready for Lane 3 but it was nice of them to acknowledge I was still making progress no matter how crappy I felt that night. It's pretty much what got me out of the door tonight.
Dave had left extra training plans out "in case we got chance to swim in a public session during the week" and it was exactly what I needed tonight; I'm so glad I picked them up. I had a much better session - numpty-free! Actually it was amazing how quickly the lane cleared of, erm, head-up swimmers once me and my friend Mr RedShorts (I have no idea of his name, he's an older chap who swims a good fast breaststroke and is very good at lane ettiquette!) arrived. 300m warm up, 300m IM - which I switched to just freestyle/breaststroke alternates as it's NOT safe to do backstroke/butterfly with people who aren't good at sharing lanes! and then a 1950m endurance build, working up in 25m increments from 25m-300m. I was supposed to alternate easy and hard sets but I lost track of which were which and more or less did everything at medium pace. But it felt like flying anyway! Everything came together (yes, after the first mile...so predictable) and I was quite sad to find I'd completed the set and needed to do my 200m warm down.
Again, my tactic of "where would I be at this distance if I were at Salford?" worked tremendously well to get me through the tedium of a pool session. I just wish I could get my new cap to stretch a bit. It's bloody annoying. But I'm looking forward to getting out for a run on Thursday!
