My partner and I started swimming a few weeks ago! We're planning to go weekly, mostly on Thursdays (though if something is happening on Thursday we're hoping to just go a different night....like we did last week). It's felt so good getting back into the water on a regular basis - I love swimming, and I love that he's coming with me, too. :)
So far we've gone three times. The first week I did 12 laps total, and treaded water for 3 minutes. The second and third week (today), I did 19 laps total and treaded water for 4 minutes. I've been doing different strokes in chunks as a way to help me keep track of how many lengths I've done. My intention is to do, in this order, 1 lap of:
- Breast stroke
- Elementary back stroke
- Side stroke (I tread water for one minutes during this stroke)
- Front crawl
- Back crawl
And then repeat. I used to do something like this when I was swimming a lot years ago, too, but I never wrote down the exact order of the strokes back at that time. It was probably almost exactly what I'm doing now though. I also always finish off with one lap of just kicking, and one lap of sculling. I find it a nice and relaxing way to end off. :)
Unfortunately I haven't been doing well with the front crawl so far, so I've been substituting back crawl for that length as necessary. This isn't surprising though - front crawl is hard and takes a bit to build up to in my experience (it's also one of my least favourite strokes, lol, so I'm not in a hurry to be doing a lot of it). Last week I didn't do any front crawl, opting instead to try to do two back-to-back back crawl laps in an effort to build some lung capacity. This week I went one way doing front crawl, then back crawl on the way back. I noticed today that I'm having weird trouble with the breathing for front crawl - normally you do "1, 2, 3, breathe" (do three strokes with your arms while blowing the air out of your lungs, then take a breath on the third stroke). But I was consistently blowing air out of my lungs for two breaths then just stopped for some reason. I'm thinking that I'll do the same front/back crawl lap next time and see how everything goes; maybe my breathing will improve once I build up my lung capacity and endurance a bit more.
I also realized that by doing the strokes in this order, I'm doing an explosive/fast lap (back crawl) then slowing things down again. I planned it this way to give myself a break in-between the fast laps, especially as I build up endurance again. But this was also a recommendation made to me many years ago during my time on my high school's bike team: to build endurance, go really fast for a minute, then slow it down for 10; repeat. I'm not sure how long the whole set of strokes takes me to get through, but it's got to be close to ten minutes; hopefully it will help build my endurance in the same way as it did while biking. :)
I'm not sure what I'm going to do during my period yet....I might still go to the gym but just use the machines if I don't feel like going in the pool. But we'll see - it will probably depend on how I'm feeling on the day (and how heavy my period is).
