Woo hooo! "gannin as fast as a fish"

Well thank you Tulatin Hills Barracudas for hosting the February Fitness Challenge. I can honestly say I've really enjoyed it and I'm truly grateful for the motivation. My short dip at lunchtime took me over the 100,000 metres mark for the month and ensured that my first Blogging Challenge was complete i.e that I swam every day in the month of February.

During last year's challenge I swam everyday but I only covered 78,250 metres, so I've definitely improved. I hope that I can keep going to complete the half a million metres in 2011 and swim at least twice a week. Sadly I am getting a bit carried away with this swimming lark. As the venerable Cheryl (Cole) would say "it's got it's mojo back" and this morning I caught myself sending off an entry for the Darlington Masters Meet at the end of March.

Back to lunchtime and deciding that I might as well get this over with, I slipped out for a lunch time dip, I couldn't make my mind up as to what I should do, should I just swim 200m and get out, should I go for a Tesco session (an express or a metro?) or a French Riviera session, (Le Touquet). With a big thank you to Katie Bun for that descriptor.  

Decisions decisions, the pool was reasonably busy with about 8 or 9 elderly head up breaststrokers, and a bloke with a spectacular screw kick who commented that "ya gannin as fast as a fish" when I stopped next to him after my warm up. Not quite sure what that meant, but I accepted it as a compliment, smiled sweetly at him and pushed off on the main set.

I was able to find enough space to plough my own little furrow. As I swam I was wrestling with how long I was going to stay in as I completed the warm up. I came to the conclusion that because tomorrow is a club night I'll probably swim anyway (and it's good practice for the leap year next year) so I could afford to have a really dossy session.

There was however a teeny part of me (the competitive part) thinking "if you only slob through 1200 metres and someone beats you by 200 metres you'll be pretty sick". It just never goes away does it no matter how laid back you try to be, the desire to beat someone is always there.

Anyway without too much effort and deliberately choosing easy and non taxing stuff to do, I covered 2,200 metres in just over 45 minutes I never really got out of third gear but hey thus ended the 2011 February Fitness Challenge.

Finishing the Final February Fitness  
600 up free down alternating back & brst warm up
10 x 100 pull (what else) @  1.45*
200 brst kick
200 free catch up 
66 free kick
66 brst kick 
133 free pull (swim down)* *

Session Total 2200m
Monthly Total 102,000

* swimming between 1.34 and 1.37's **added the extra two at the end cos I think I miscounted the warm up!