Looking back at February & planning ahead
I know that February is the shortest month of the year, even with the extra day in the month this year, but is it just me or did it completely fly by?!
This is how February was for me. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to and what you’re planning for March.
Brushing up and preparing for the upcoming season
February started with a lovely weekend with SwimQuest at their guide weekend. It was a great way to get an update on how 2019 was for the company and to what their plans are ahead. We brushed up on our first aid and CPR skills, refreshed our knowledge of safety procedures. It wouldn’t be a Swim Guide weekend without swimming, so we practiced some coaching skills too.
Alongside all the business, we also had the chance for a bit of yoga and some non-serious downtime.
It’s not just about preparing for training camps in Croatia, though, I’ve also spent time preparing for the start of the Dover training season.
Vaseline ordered ✅
Signing-in books ordered ✅
First aid kit replenished ✅
Membership system ready to take new swimmers ✅
Request for sponsorship interest ✅
Request for support with sorting the volunteer rota ✅
Corporate life
Whilst I handed in my notice in January, with senior roles, there are clear communication paths to follow to ensure all key stakeholders are aware of the upcoming change. By far the hardest of these conversations was telling my team. I have a fantastic team, without a doubt this will be the hardest bit about leaving.
I also put a link to the advert for my replacement on LinkedIn. Last time I looked there had been over 14,200 views of this post and quite a bit of interest in the role. Hopefully, as well as me moving onto an exciting new adventure, someone else will benefit from that and take on a fantastic new role and go on to do it their way.
I leave on the 2nd of April, so right now I’m working hard to finish of what I can and leave my team in a good place and give my successor an easy transition in.
Continuous learning
This month I attended a fascinating training course. One that I suspect will be a subject of a blog post in its own right. The course was Hypnosis for enhanced sports performance.
There were many things that I liked about this course:
It’s in an area that I’m already passionate about
Everything that was taught was backed up by evidence from research and trials
It can be applied to any sport and to any sports person
So, if you would be interested in improving in one or more of these areas, please get in touch:
Creating strong goals that are like future memories
Self-efficacy (our own judgement of our own ability)
Self-talk
Mental imagery
Reduced perception of effort (whilst still maintaining actual physical workload at the same level)
Getting into a state of ‘flow’
Actual muscular strength
Mobilisation of effort and strength on demand
Speed & quality of recovery
Swimming
Training
Training remains on track. I continue to work in a cyclical pattern. Of course, life isn’t quite as simple as that and with work and other commitments to factor in I need to show a certain amount of flexibility. So, in order to ensure I’m not on a recovery week when I have my training camp in Croatia in April or on a peak training week for my last week with AstraZeneca, I’ve tweaked accordingly. That has meant that in February whilst I was able to progressively build, I have now started a gentle decline rather than a single recovery week. So more of a pyramid shape. In terms of totals, I have done:
34 hours of swimming covering 83,550 metres
2 hours of yoga
2 hours of body balance
8.25 hours in the gym (including some high intensity circuits classes)
4 rest days
Trust an accountant to create a good spreadsheet!
I wrote a blog post recently about my approach to training plans. It’s not something that I’ve done before. So far it has been helpful. I can see how you can become obsessed by the need to keep up when perhaps it would be better to stop and rest. To counter this I also track things like mood, energy levels, muscle soreness etc. I’ve rarely had too much muscle soreness, but whether there has been it has generally been due to really tough masters training.
Some weeks I have been full of energy and with a very good mood. Some have been more challenging. Of course, nothing happens in isolation and it’s not only training that will impact energy & mood. Work stresses, commute and other influences including residual grief processes also take their toll.
All that said, I will be keeping a close eye in case tiredness continues as it could be a sign of over-training. Should that happen, I will reduce my training load, regardless of how I am doing compared to the plan or where I am in the training cycle. There is zero point in doing mindless metres or starting the endurance part of the season exhausted.
So what else have I noticed?
Well, I’m faster in training. I recover quicker. There have been times when I’m super excited about the season ahead. Other times when I’m a bit lethargic and would rather sleep!
The one day that I did overdo it was when I did a 30 minute high intensity circuits class, followed by an hour in the gym (it seemed a bit lightweight to only do 30 minutes of anything) and then body balance which I rationalised was like a warm down. Whilst I did all of that and felt ok, maybe I could have just done one or two of the three!
Competing
Ready to go
This month we had the Welsh Open Masters, incorporating the GB Masters 1500m. I only swam one day of the competition and focused on two events:
400m Freestyle
1500m Freestyle
The event is long course (i.e. it’s in a 50m pool, like the Olympics, rather than most pools which are 25m). I’m lucky in that I do get to do some of my masters training sessions in a long course pool, so long course versus short course holds no fears. What does make a difference to times is having half as many turns. I once heard that it can make 1 second difference per turn.
400m Freestyle
It was only January when I competed in this event last, and on that occasion I swam it in 7:03.73. Given the improvement in training, I could hope that maybe I could improve on that.
Bronze!
I gave the race my all, I couldn’t have done more. The time was 7:10.78 which is quite a bit slower. It was disappointing but I rationalised it by then adding a bit of realism, I was at the peak of a progressively challenging 4 weeks of training. In the days leading up to the competition as well as commuting, I’d done nearly 7 hours of swimming, a gym session and body balance. Only the day before I’d joked with our masters coach when I pointed out that they are not in my will and therefore won’t actually benefit if they kill me off in training. Perhaps with hindsight, this isn’t the relaxing taper you’d normally perform in order to swim well!
On a positive note, I did win a bronze medal (and I wasn’t last!).
1500m Freestyle
Whilst the 400m event was the first one of the day, the 1500m event was the last one. I had oodles of time to recover and reflect on what happened in the 400m race. I reminded myself that I swim progressively better through competitions (this is true, why it’s true is one I ponder on from time to time) and that the 800m event at the nationals last year was my best event and the approach I had taken was to try less and relax more. So I decided that would be my race strategy for this event.
One of the biggest stresses for this event was that as this was a GB event, the entry time is automatically based on your fastest time in the last two years. For me that was in November 2018 and it was a short course event. That time was about 20 seconds faster than the same event at the nationals in 2019. Add to that the difference between short course and long course and at best I was looking at being a minute outside my entry time and in my head I figured more like 2 minutes outside.
I wasn’t alone in this stress though. When I got to the start of the event, almost without fail, all of the swimmers in my heat were also stressing about the same thing and warning each other that they couldn’t swim that fast and may be lapped.
So you can imagine my relief that after the start I noticed the faster (on paper) swimmers pull ahead, but not by much and that there were also people behind me. That enabled me to carry on with my plan to relax through the race. That said, I didn’t do my normal bilateral breathing as I was still swimming faster than I would in training and the extra oxygen was useful! How on earth did I ever do a channel swim breathing only one way - it’s soooo uncomfortable!!
The results shows that I maintained an even pace with faster first and last 100m splits. At the end I was puffing a lot less than the 400m. So what was my time? Well it was 27:12.41 which, whilst not a great time, was only 36 seconds slower than the nationals last year, and I can account for a theoretical 30 of those seconds through 30 less turns. So I was actually pretty happy with the result, I was expecting a lot worse.
What was amusing was that the split at 400m was 7:08 which is 2 seconds faster than the actual 400m race. This shouldn’t actually be possible! It does show that I swim far better and faster and with a lower perceived effort if I just relax!
Individual Clients
I continue to work with both sporting and business clients in both coaching and therapeutic contexts. So if you’ve got ‘stuff’ that just seems to get in your way or you want out how to unearth your best you consistently, please do get in touch. I’m now taking bookings for May.
emma@emma2france.com 07702 814690
What does March have in store?
March looks set to be another busy month. In no particular order I have the following in my calendar outside of my corporate role:
The CS&PF dinner. It’s always lovely to celebrate the successes of the previous year’s swimmers, particularly swimmers I train in Dover. I’ll share the video that I create for the event once it has aired there.
Level 1 & 2 Swim Teacher. 9 days of training over 3 long weekends. I’m looking forward to furthering my swim teaching & coaching knowledge
Training - of course, it wouldn’t be the same without that!
I’d love to hear from you. How was February for you? What did you achieve, what did you learn? What have you got planned for March?