Please tell me how....
829
Member
1392 days
catwood posted 3 years ago.
nope, your not alone...
I used to swim competitively (for 9 years, half my life!!) and the toughest training months are January and February. Its definitely takes mental effort to get to the pool 6 days a week in single digit weather. But its actually easier now that I'm focusing on triathlon swimming. On the swim team I was on and the high school team, is was up to 2.5 hours of very difficult training. It always seemed like the entire workout, except for the warmup and cooldown, was anaerobic. I actually signed up for a triathlon swim training class in jan at 6:15 am this year... I guess its such a habit to go swimming in freezing weather at ungodly hours that I miss it...
So sure its hard, and there are no immediate benefits, but for tri's, winter's a great time to really set perfect technique to muscle memory and swim often enough to keep it that way - ideally almost every day for a short time and one or two longer sessions/wk. Then when tri season rolls around, you have a great swimming base and your stroke is instinctive so you can back off and just do speed work depending on what distance you like... then you can run and bike more now that the weather's better and not have to worry about the swim.
to be more motivated to hit the pool when it's freezing outside and my first tri of the year is 5 months away. I use to swim for an hour 2 to 3 times a week but now find it hard to go once a week. I still bike(trainer) and run everyday, it's just swimming when it's cold outside and there doesn't seem to be any hurry to be in swimming shape makes me put it off....am I alone here???