320+ team members in lock down

Curious to know what our 320+ team members are doing? Here’s news from a few of them.

Muriel: “WE’RE BUSY DOING NOTHING. AND I’M BUSY CYCLING NOWHERE. With a gain of 6lbs in 6 weeks, it looks as if all sporting events will be those of the TELLY TUBBIES. Keep afloat. It doesn’t matter about the fit & slim everyone is in that boat. SWIMMATE Muriel H.”

 Grace: “Of course like the rest of you am missing swimming, fortunately I have a small garden so  am at least able to go out there in the gorgeous weather we’ve been having.

I try to do a session of tai chi each day, as suggested by Amanda, plus some stretching exercises, and walking on the spot, as I’m in lockdown for 12 weeks, at least.

Forward  planning – swim wise; get swim fit, as for competitions, If the Europeans still go ahead, also would love to go to South African masters next  year which are to be held in Cape Town, next year is  my last year in my current age group.

Personally- hope to get my second cataract operation done, which as expected was cancelled.  I’m also looking forward to visiting families in Spain and New Zealand again. At least thinking about these keeps me positive.

Roll on us all being together in the pool again, missing you all at competitions. 

Keep well and safe. Grace“

Di : Hi everyone. Hope you are all staying safe and keeping well.

Funny how sometimes I don’t feel like swimming (I mean training!) but when I can’t go for whatever reason, I really want to.  I’m missing seeing the usual crowd I swim with and exchanging the friendly banter.

Not being a fan of general exercises I usually rely on swimming to keep myself reasonably fit, so apart from going for the occasional walk I’ve been doing quite a bit of gardening.  Nothing fancy, just a lot of weeding. I did Pilates a while ago so I may dig out my mat and give it another go.  Otherwise the usual household chores are keeping me busy so time has not been dragging yet.  

I’m so disappointed not to be going to the British and European Championships, BA recently cancelled our flights to Budapest for the Europeans. If it goes ahead at a later date it should be interesting to see how not being water fit is reflected in the competition results.

Stay safe everyone and I look forward to seeing you all as soon as life returns to normal.

Nigel: I have been trying to keep fit with cross training and land work using my small gym and the Concept 2 indoor rower. On alternate days I do Lower body and Cardio, meaning rowing,  and then Upper Body and Core, with 1 day off per week and am now starting Week 8 since I stopped swimming.  

Concept 2 have an on line log for recording your training with the ability to rank your performance for different events with verification provided by the software in the monitor. However they use Age on the Day and 10 year age bands so I am ranking against the youngsters of 70 or so (being 80 later this year). Nevertheless this system provides a good incentive to work hard and my Sheffield Substitute was a couple of virtual time trials which were worth ranking. It is interesting that recommended training sets from Concept 2 include quite a lot of what we call speed play in swimming. For variety and as an aspiring so called sprinter I have also been trying Tabata training on the rower with 20 sec Hard and 10 sec Easy alternating over 4 min. Re land work I was grateful for the link from Spencer to the FINA presentation and as a result have increased the exercises using the Swiss Ball, i. e. unstable surfaces and all that.

 Whether or not this helps competitive swimming remains to be seen! For we oldies this may be some way off.

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