Training. Swimming - the least favored session

I grew up as a swimmer, my earliest childhood memories are of early mornings, chlorine, and always feeling wet (wet hair, water in ears, wet towel in school bag, and worst of all wet pants when you forgot to pack underwear and had to where the swimming suit from the morning session for underwear).

I was once able to complete 5 to 6 k sessions in a canter.  A 1k warm up was pretty normal.  At my very best I was somewhere around the top ten in the country for my favored event (50 m freestyle) getting it all done in under 23.5 seconds.  Well that was back in the day, and now is now.

Today I did my first swim session in a while and it wasnt pretty.  The session was basically:

Warm-up.  400 free, 100 brst

Main Set.   10 x 50 free @ 80% on 1:15 interval.
(averaged completion in 42-44 s per 50)

Dev Set. 4 x 100.  alternate kick/pull

Cool Down. 100m free, drills.

While it felt crap I did stick to plan and I'm confident I'm ready for the 750m swim I have on Sunday and pretty sure I'll be ready for the 2k swim in June, but the 1500m in March feels at risk.  I so need to get back into a regular swimming regime.

Losing weight got harder - I'm injured.

Ok, the latest installment of my fight with fat - to see where it started go here. Well losing weight just got a little harder. One of the problems with being fat and over 40 is that you are also prone to more injuries.

This one was embarrassingly ordinary. I went out for a gentle kick around with a soccer ball with mates at work, overstretched a touch and strained a groin muscle - how dumb. Well now I'm hobbling around like a really old man and have to be careful about staying still too long or it gets used to being in one place and it kills to move.

Still, I've got on the ride and refuse to get off - I can still swim. So I started swimming yesterday.

All in all swimming is a crap exercise for losing weight, at least when you first start. Why? Because to lose weight you need to lift your heart rate and keep it high for some time. When you first start swimming this is virtually impossible as your arms and shoulders will simply run out of power well before your heart is working hard enough. That's whats happening to me. Yesterday I squeezed out 400 meters, and I could only do that as 8x50 meter swims. Today I stretched that to 500 meters, a 100m plus another 8x50 meter swims.

This is killing me emotionally, you see I used to swim competitively as a kid and I wasn't bad. At my best I was swimming around the mid 23 seconds for a 50 freestyle. Today the fastest I could manage was 1 minute 10 seconds. That's nearly 17 seconds slower than I used to do a 100m!

Well, its just another thing that's going to have to change. If you are interested in my progress, have tips or questions feel free to comment.