5 November 2021
I had been dragging lately in my workouts, then got waylaid over the last week by a massive pain in my neck that seemed to radiate through my lower back and right shoulder. I was at the point where I couldn't really turn my neck and swimming anything other than backstroke was painful ... because I also had pulled something in my hamstring/groin area which made breaststroke not possible.
I was feeling like a mid-50 year old man and not liking it,
After a number of days of lighter effort and just backstroke, I finally felt good enough Friday morning to attempt my "Dave Salo Pulse Plot" test set of 8 x 100s (see a detailed writeup here) and compared my performance to just about one year ago and almost exactly 10 years ago:
The general direction of increasing fitness is for the line to move to the right and down (e.g., get faster with a lower aggregate heart rate). The key learnings are these:
I'm better than I was a year ago, but not quite my 44 year old self
I need to get a life ... what kind of dork tracks this stuff for over a decade?