One Clydesdale’s Journey

And proper technique requires a lot of training.

Ergo, if you stop training you can lose that technique very quickly. And I just discovered that the hard way this past Saturday when I got in the pool for the first time in over 2 months.

The lack of training hurt my running a bit, but overall I didn’t lose that much time and what little that I did lose I was able to get back pretty quickly. If anything suffered with my running it would be stamina. And I could pretty much same the same thing about the bike now that I’ve gotten back on it a few times.

But the swim! That’s a whole other story.
I really felt the lack of training right from the first few strokes and it never got any better from there.

On both my easy 100 and my fast 100; I was slower by over 15 seconds. That may not sound like a lot at first, but multiply that out to either a half or full mile and the number becomes significant.

And while I’ve never been the prettiest swimmer out there when I’m going all out for time, I could feel that even my slow pace was sloppy, ugly and anything but smooth.

Oh yeah, and I could really feel it in the muscles both right then and there as well as the next day.

Next time (hopefully I won’t, but you never know) I lose my motivation I need to make sure that it isn’t for as long of a period as it was this time.

I think the better thing to do is to just take some planned time off with a set schedule as to when training will start back up. That way I can let myself slack off for a little bit, but there is a fixed end to it rather than just flailing around aimlessly which is definitely what I did.

At least I’m back at it now, now the only trick is finding the time to get to the gym and get in the pool.

Later,
John W.
A Clydesdale in training