Last week was my final push before my first recovery week.
The week started with the first Bars and Bells session at the gym. I was quite nervous given I have never actually been to a fitness class at the gym before but I felt it was an important and good way to potentially look into joining a class in the future. We started learning the basics and went through several different exercises. I pushed it a bit hard and it wasn’t till afterwards that I realised it.
Tuesday was my usual personal training session, but we did something a bit different to normal. We have started to add in more exercises that will hopefully help me to lose some weight, we did some ‘hill runs’ outside and headed into the gym to get my heart rate even higher by alternating between sprints on the hand bike and weighted sled pulls. The second part of the session we worked more on my function and mobility and are still working on my confidence that my legs will work and be there. I am slowly getting a bit more strength in my ankles, but it is taking time and is painful building it up.
Wednesday morning, I headed to the lake in Hampton for a swim, it didn’t go to plan. I woke up in pain where I think I had overdone it with the 2 gym sessions. However, I still went ahead and went to the lake, got changed and I entered the water. As soon as I was in the water my legs felt like they were burning, and it was agony like I hadn’t felt for years.
I took a few steps forwards until I was waist deep in the water and was frozen in pain. I managed to stay in the water for about 10 minutes, but I was in so much pain that I just couldn’t swim anywhere. I did manage to dip my shoulders under the water but sadly, that was all. When I got home my foot was blue and very swollen and I ended up spending the rest of the day in bed asleep.
I didn’t really feel like doing anything on Thursday, my pain was still high, and I was still fatigued but I knew my goal for the week was 8km and if I didn’t go swimming I wouldn’t achieve it. I headed to the pool and decided to just see what happened. I did the whole session in 500m intervals with the aim of doing 3 but I felt pretty good so did a 4th brining my total for the session up to 2.1km including the cool down.
Friday was my best swimming day of training so far and it was slightly unexpected. The entire session was based around 100m reps. I worked off the clock on 2.05 per 100m for an hour, it was tough, but it felt amazing too. I finished with a long swim bringing the total for the swim up to 3km; the longest swim I have done in training since my injury so far!
I did originally have a plan to swim on Saturday but decided to give myself a break and have a day of rest, so my next training was Sunday. I’ve never swum at the pool on a Sunday before but it went ok, I was the fastest in the lane, which hasn’t happened for a long time and meant that I had to do quite a lot of over taking, making it difficult for me to do a ‘formal’ set and I felt like getting out. In the end, I did manage to finish the week on a high with swimming 2700m over the hour, which I broke down into smaller chunks, starting by doing 500m, 400m, 300m, 200m, 100m. It actually turned out to be a decent swim set and brought my total distance for the week up to 8100m!
Next week is recovery week and I will probably swim half the distance I covered this week but I am also hoping I may get chance for a short swim in the sea as I am spending the weekend in Folkestone for the Channel Swimming and Piloting Federation Annual dinner!