Here the promised update on how the winter training for the English Channel went. Again, apologizes for the delay. I have been basically exhausted ever since about February and could not find the extra energy to update the blog. One of the biggest challenges I seem to be fighting during this period is being perpetually tired from burning the candle at both ends and training hard. Usually when training increases, the best practice is for an athlete to increase sleep time instead of decrease sleep time. When I signed up for this crazy adventure, I did not anticipate sleep deprivation as one of the components.
As mentioned in the December posting, I slowly started ramping up the weekly yardage to reach 50,000 yards a week by April. My training regiment during this period was to swim with a Master's team twice a week, swim on my own 3-4 times a week and swim in Eliz's Endless Pool that she kept at 59-60F once a week. The Master's workouts were to keep some speed and stroke work in my regiment. I would usually get in the pool early (as soon as the pool opened) as well as stay an extra 1/2 hour afterwards to add distance. On my own, I would work on LSD (Long Slow Distance) sets that would usually consist of sets with a minimum distance of 30 minutes. I head to Eliz's Endless Pool with the hope that the once a week would slow my loss of cold adaptation. Not sure if it worked or not. I did notice that as the winter went on it was getting tougher and tougher getting into her pool. As a side note on the temperature of her pool. It is frequently reported that fresh water will feel colder then salt water at the same temperature. Not sure how much is real versus perceived. Eliz and I noticed that her Endless Pool at her house which is at an elevation of approximately 8000 ft (2400m) felt even colder. We were not sure if it was the forced current over the body (like how a wind cools you down in air) or if it was the altitude. The bottom line is it made jumping in her pool in the dark early morning in the middle of winter with multiple feet of snow outside a mental battle each time I got in.
As the winter went on, my weekend swims would get longer and longer as the weekly yardage crept toward 50,000 yards. By the end of February, I was doing 3 hours, mid March it was 4 hours. The second week of March, I did my first greater then 50,000 yard week, 3 weeks before my goal. Part of the reason was a had a week long vacation in the Caribbean to celebrate my 25 wedding anniversary and I knew I would not get a lot of swimming in that week. Except for that week off, I was able to maintain the greater then 50,000 yards a week until first week of May when I finally took a recovery week (only a mere 36,000 yard week). This was a solid 6 weeks in a row of greater then 50,000 yards to set a solid base of training before the serious cold water training was to begin in the spring. One amazing thing that I would guess could be attributed to a rigorous adherence to a steady ramp up was that I did not have any overuse injuries show up during this spell. I will also admit to adding a reasonable amount of backstroke into the training to help balance my front/back muscles since I had a misbalance problem that resulted in an overuse injury showing up just before Malta the previous year. Whatever the recipe was, it felt great to hit a solid training period with that high a mileage given my age with no twinges in my muscles. I exited this training period feeling a confident and ready to start hitting the cold water!
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