Friday catch up

Right - started my hols today and the catch up training as well. I
decided to go for a run in the morning - around the block - quite a
nice run actually as it was fairly cool and the roads were quiet as it
is a bank holiday. I managed a nice 5km run in about 26 mins including
a couple of hills. It was fairly comfortable - and I could have gone
faster - but I wanted to preserve my knee. It was a little sore to
start off with - but the pain went fairly quickly after the first
kilometer or so.

After a hearty milkshake (diet of course) for breakfast - we were off
to the gym. I decided to catch up on the swimming - so managed a
decent 2,500 - 3,000m in about 70 mins, all with no logs and front
crawl. Its quite nice just using a pull buoy and concentrating on your
stroke and making sure it is technically good. I even started
counting my strokes. Apparently Michael Phelps can cover a 25m pool in
approximately 7 strokes, and reading an article on good swimming
technique I was intrigued to read that you should try to get your
stroke rate down to 20 strokes for 25m ideally - only stroking when
you feel yourself slowing down and try to glide the rest of the time.
I counted a few of the people in the lanes and their stroke rate was
fairly easily 20+ strokes a length so I thought mine would be a
problem to get down to 20 - but oddly when I counted - mine was
already 14 - 15 strokes a length - so I'm quite pleased with that. I
actually feel like I am thrashing about in fact when I up the rate at
all.

After that was 25 minutes on the spinning cycle, I managed somewhere
in the region of 10-15km at a high cadence and pretty much knackering
myself out.

I'm aching like crazy now and have a compression top on as my arms
once again feel as if they are falling apart, but I am pretty pleased.
I know I will wake up starving tomorrow - but for now I am content to
lie in bed and watch Ronin on the TV.