Saturday 22 January 2011

Can I outsmart an excel spreadsheet?..... 473,300 metres to go

I am sitting here feeling quite smug and proud of myself having managed to drag myself out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7.15am this mornng (well it's ungodly for a Saturday) to make training at 8am. The first major obstacle was the lack of petrol in the car, probably not enough to get there, and then I couldn't find my wallet. My crashing around the house at this time of the day went down well with the rest of my family trying to enjoy the luxury of a Saturday morning lie in, and I ultimately had to make do with stealing back my daughter's bus fare from her blazer pocket.

One of my successes this week was to locate my swim bag with all of my toys in, you know paddles, fins, pullbuoy, kick-board etc. I don't know about you but when not in use this bag of paraphenalia usuallly lives behind the sofa and is dropped on the floor as soon as I walk into the house. At my most slothful I can't even be bothered to take my cossie out to dry it and I end up draping this fairly essential bit of swimming kit on the top of the car dashboard and driving to my next session with the heater on full blast to dry it out; mists the windscreen up a bit and gives off a bit of a chloriney pong...but hey it works for me.

Anyway I had tidied the bag away on Christmas Eve as part of my annual clean up, (the only time you can guarantee my house is tidy is Christmas Eve), and couldn't remember were I'd put it, it finally came to light in the garage under a pile of empty boxes. I haven't been completely devoid of swimming toys as my TYR kickboard managed to work its way out of the bag and has spent a month or so kicking around the back of my car and this has doubled as a pullbuoy so far this year.

Arriving at Heworth this morning there was only three of us initially so we had the luxury of a lane each, that is until Synchro Dad got in to keep the Fairy Snow Baby company. We were as organised as usual and after some discussion FSB and myself opted for a slow plod. Opening the bag I discovered that I only had one training paddle although for some reason Bob's Speedo hydrofoil paddles which are also a large size had somehow made their way in there, so I was forced to make do, it took a couple of lengths to get used to them but I was pleasantly suprised that they weren't as difficult to use as I had thought. 

8 x 50's free @ 55 warm up
3 x 400's free @ 7.30 pull with paddles,
2 x 400's free @ 7.30 pull
1 x 400 swim.
8 x 75's IM Order @ 1.40swum as 25 kick, 25 drill, 25 swim
100 Swim down*
Total 3500 metres

* probably should have done some more here but thought that I'd done enough this week.

In my previous post I mentioned about Trondi's swim log spreadsheet, well I'm even more impressed with it. It cleverly calculates your target distance each week and displays this in a box next to your weekly total. I hadn't thought about it before but it displays the weekly total in red, I added today's yardage (ok I know that it's metreage but that doesn't sound so good) and having exceeded the weekly target; lo and behold the weekly total was displayed in green. I know little things.....

I had to laugh as well cos when I completed the box with my target yardage for the year, it then advised me that this was not a sensible target, so extra motivation there can I outsmart an excel spreadsheet?

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