Mid-Channel....

Mid-Channel....

Monday 4 October 2010

Time Flies.....

So much has gone on in the last two weeks that I want to talk about so I will try and cover it all in the next few posts. As you probably gathered I had a fantastic time during my swim to the Isle of Wight but generally the time since the Double has been extremely tough. I have always wanted to try and identify the highs and lows of training for an event such as this but don't want to put too much out there on a public forum. Suffice to say that I have certainly had post-event blues which I have been told are extremely normal. The problem is that I still haven't really had my post-season month off yet because despite doing very little training I have still been caught up mentally in the Channel relay and the Isle of Wight swim. It has also been a difficult time personally as three days before the relay, I lost my Uncle suddenly to cancer which had only been diagnosed shortly before. All this combined with a tough time at work and Adam still being away has made me extremely lethargic and not really up for anything, let only training. I think the mental aspect of training for an event such as this is really interesting and I'd love there to be some psychological studies done on the personality types of women, in particular, who attempt these sort of events. I really believe people are searching for something or running from something or have some sort of addictive personality when they do these kind of things. I'm not saying this is a negative thing as, well managed, this is obviously helping people to achieve fabulous things but I do know a number of women who are top endurance specialists who are using their events to escape depression or eating disorders. I wonder what my poison is?!

Anyway, Adam was home last week which really really helped me get things a bit back into perspective and cheered me up a bit. I am SLOWLY starting to feel like training again and have set up a challenge for myself so I can get a great swim block in through October while he's still away. The challenge is to swim 10lengths x the day of the month so 10L on the first day, 20 on the second all the way to 310 lengths on the 31st. It will be extremely tough especially during the latter half of the month but I am hoping it will get me back into the routine of training and build me a great block of swim endurance too!

The first three days are under my belt but typically I have been hit by a horrid cold the last few days - I hope I can shake it before the number of lengths increases significantly!

I need to have a think about what I'd like to achieve in intermediate goals by the end of the year. I am thinking a 10km swim and a marathon but we'll see how it goes! Not even thinking of biking until it gets warm again - it's hard enough fitting in two sports - how on earth did I manage with three! (oh yes, I didn't really do any swimming - well that's certainly en route to change!!)

Day 4 - 40 lengths here I come! :)

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