Swimmers Blog
Charlotte
Charlotte is a Community Fundraiser for Barnardo’s in the North West. She is an experienced swimmer and trains several times each week with Manchester Triathlon Club and also swims alone (doing between 64 and 100 25m lengths each time), though she admits to using Great Swim to improve her overall fitness. Here’s her blog:
I’ve had a lot of time on my hands recently so my intention was to fit in as much swimming as possible. Like all New Year’s Resolutions, this fell somewhat by the wayside. However, I still appear to be making viable progress, so I think I can forgive myself.
Club training has been brilliant, both for motivation and for progress. Monday nights are mostly spent working on technique, Tuesdays tend to focus on general stamina building and Thursdays take place in a gruelling, unforgiving 50m pool and and succeed in showing you how far you have yet to go. I’ve made it to a lot of Monday night sessions, and have had some brilliant intentions of making it to all the Tuesday and Thursday meetings but have fallen behind on a few. So, to cut a long story short, my stroke is looking really great, but I haven’t progressed much with my mile time.
I’ve been subsidising these club sessions with my own daytime swims too, although, since I swim in the Manchester Aquatics Centre (brilliant pool!), I am at the mercy of their council-appointed schedule. Another swim team uses the pool between 4pm and 8pm EVERY WEEK DAY, which forces us hardened, serious swimmers into the shallow pool to battle with canoodling teenage couples and non-swimmers. In fact, my most shameful moment was assaulting an elderly gentleman who was swimming ill-advised widths across the path of we disgruntled, displaced, canoodler-avoiding lane swimmers. He recovered nicely though and didn’t have me thrown out so, following a few tuts and frowns from passers-by, I wended my merry way. Swimming provides a vast resource in which to hide your face.
In other news, I’ve been giving “lessons” to a couple of friends recently, one of whom is swimming the Great North Swim in September and would like to improve on last year’s time by switching to crawl instead of breaststroke. While crawl is the fastest stroke, it can also be the most strenuous and tiring if you’re doing it wrong. There’s a further problem as my friend wants to simply improve his breaststroke. Make of that what you will. I’ve loved these lesson sessions as both friends have progressed brilliantly and their love of swimming seems to have increased. Also they make me feel all important as I actually have actual knowledge I can actually impart to actual other people. Swimming is an activity that can and should be enjoyed by everyone. One of the reasons I will continue to take part in the Great Swims is that it’s so refreshing to have a mass-participation event centred around something other than running – a high-impact, hard, unforgiving sport. Spread the swimming love people! Get in the pool!
Big Dave
Big Dave lives in Gloucester is a digital media officer at the Meningitis Trust and has an illustrious career of charity fund-raising behind him – though none of it has involved swimming. In fact, Big Dave describes himself as more of a runner – he’s tackled the Bupa Great North Run as well as the Chicago Marathon – and admits to being a swimming novice with a poor technique, which he is trying to improve with the help of swimming lessons. Here’s Big Dave’s blog:
My swimming training has started! I’m not a very strong swimmer, so this session was all about seeing what my ability is, and what needs to be done. I did two lengths, and thought, blimey, this swimming’s tough. I took to swimming half lengths after that, as then I wasn’t out of my depth (needing a life guard on my first session would be embarrassing), and breaking at the end of each set of half lengths.
One of the reasons I’ve not really swum much, despite liking fitness, is that I’m rather short sighted. In my breaks, I tried to watch others’ techniques to learn, but couldn’t see too much of the good swimmers at the other side of the pool (which was divided into lanes). This was still useful though, and some of my later mini lengths did feel easier than when I’d started. Ruth’s fiancé is checking out prices of prescription goggles for me (he’s an optician). At lunch, Charlotte had given me a call, and her tips were very useful. I just need to get into the habit of doing them without thinking about having to do them!
Despite many breaks, I did about 40 minutes of swimming when added together, and about 20 odd lengths. When I finished, my arms certainly felt they’d had a good workout, and there are a few muscles in there that I’ve evidently under used.
I’m on the waiting list for individual lessons and start weekend lessons in April. I’ve a full four months to build on this and I can’t wait to add swimming to my skills (that’s what this challenge is about, in part, for me).
Ruth
Ruth is a speech and language therapist currently living in Portsmouth. She is using her Great Swim preparation to improve her general fitness. She is an intermediate swimmer with some past experience and is intending to swim at least twice a week, boosting her fitness with training at home. Here is Ruth’s blog:
I began my training in early January with my first visit to a swimming pool in about a year. I decided the best idea was to go to a pool on the way to work that doesn’t involve having to get up earlier. I can get up the same time and just get an earlier train.
The plan is to swim twice a week for about 30 to 45 minutes. I was pretty pleased to do 32 lengths in half an hour – certainly something to build on! By March, I had increased the distance to 40 lengths in about 40 minutes with two breaks in the first 20 lengths.
I was very tired from work but now the mornings are lighter and I’ve settled into my work routine, I’m back to training. By the end of March, I did 40 lengths in a 33.3m pool. I could have kept swimming but ran out of time and had to go to work.
I’m not keen on public pools! There are only two lanes in the morning – one for the very slow and another for the very fast. I am somewhere in the middle but managed to get into a good rhythm and didn’t need to stop, which was great.
At the moment, I am working on building up my endurance. I know I can swim a mile with no problems but I usually have to stop a couple of times for a breather. That won’t be an option when I’m doing the actual swim so I need to be able to swim a mile in the pool with no stops. Then I can work on building on that for the cold water and the wetsuit.
Simon
Simon, an IT infrastructure engineer, lives in Reading and, as well as attempting three Great Swims, is getting married this year. While admitting that he’s not keen on running, he says he is something of a swimming beginner with a poor technique as well as other challenges to overcome – though he has managed to swim 40 lengths in the past. He plans on swimming once a week to start with but is prepared to “up it if things don’t improve”. Here’s his blog:
My outdoor swimming preparation really began on New Year’s Day when I managed to persuade a bunch of people to join me in doing the Loony Dook, a massive winter dip in the Forth at Queensferry near Edinburgh in the shadow of the Forth Rail Bridge.
I’m really looking forward to the swims but I have a big challenge to sort out before I can ever hope to get fit enough to do them. I’m a little bit ADHD so training regimes tend to fall by the wayside pretty quickly when I’m faced with an hour or so of something repetitive such as swimming up and down the lanes of my local pool. I’m OK with the exercise bike now that I have moved it to my “man cave” and set it up in front of the big TV but I really need to do a lot of swimming to make sure I have the all round muscle tone and fitness I’ll need for the great swims.
I’ve decided to go for waterproofing my iPod shuffle so that I can listen to music, podcasts and audiobooks while I swim, which will mean I’ll be occupied for longer and so spend more time in the water training. Unfortunately, the options for waterproofing an iPod are pretty limited so I’m trying to come up with a solution myself.
I still hadn’t waterproofed the iPod for my first swim and so got bored after 20 lengths and went to the sauna. This made me realise that I need to up my game a little.
On Friday nights my local pool has a public swim until 8pm and then restricts it to over 18s after that – it’s a real pain that pools don’t seem to make a distinction between kids that want to splash about and muck around and those that want to join in the lane swimming. My little brother is 15 and wanted to go swimming so we had to go during the public session, which was crammed to the rafters with kids. There were a couple of lanes set aside and so long as you don’t mind the odd inflatable in the face it’s not too bad. I got on with some swimming and powered through a fair few lengths until the alarm went off and we were all evacuated from the pool while the guys in yellow fished a non-swimmer out of the deep end. After that I lost my rhythm and retired to the sauna with 32 lengths notched up. I rewarded myself with some pork pies to help me retain my natural buoyancy!
Finally managed a swim with my newly waterproofed iPod and managed to do 64 lengths in under an hour, though the last 20 were utter purgatory. I have a feeling that I’m going to be very stiff tomorrow but it’s my first proper mile. Tunes that helped were anything by the Arctic Monkeys and Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. I had to skip a few of the slower tracks because I wanted to keep my pace up, fortunately a Reel Big Fish ska cover of the Ah-Ha classic Take on Me came on towards the end and kept me going for the last couple of lengths.
You can read more about Charlotte, Big Dave, Ruth and Simon by visiting their own site at:
http://greatswims.ragabonds.org.uk/
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