I have never been a good swimmer. I tend to sink, my body just doesn’t float, or barely. Nonetheless, since my daughter is playing water polo, I figured that I might as well take this time to swim and maybe get better at a sport that I’ve never had much chance to take time and practice.
One thing I lack is coordination. I mean, most of the stuff I can do well but doing two different movement with 2 parts of the body and while focussing on breathing in at the right time and breathing out in the water. The whole is a lot to master. but I know this is a good, very good exercise and that it matches quite well with running as it’s an aerobic workout. I went to the pool a few times in the last few weeks, and even though I’m still not good at it, I’ll persevere. It is a good training for the winter time as I hate running in the winter.
There are a few things I don’t like about running outside in the cold season. First and foremost, the cold. I find it difficult to adapt my clothing to the weather. This is specially true for my hands. I never found any gloves I don’t get too cold or over sweaty. The second thing that bothers me is performance. Some streets are well cleared and the snow grips are annoying, and on the same run, a few streets later, they are icy or covered with uneven snow. This obviously results in an uneven performance time which I find frustrating. The snow makes the propulsion un-efficient and it’s very difficult to figure if you’ve improved or if you’ve regressed. Since my training is using only the GPS to get the pace, it’s not a good indicator of the effort. I don’t have a heart rate monitor to use as a guide on my performance/effort.
So, back to swimming, I started a bit and yet, I enjoy swimming. Not quite good, not quite elegant but I started wondering if I could try something like a triathlon. I would dare to think of an Ironman, that is for sure but I think that I could try with the olympic distances next summer. 1.5 km of swimming, 40km of cycling and 10km of running. Even a “sprint” which is half of theses distances would be pretty good. The swimming is the part that I don’t do very well but I feel I could try.