Started today’s exercise with a swim. Working on breathing on both sides with the crawl – absolutely awful! Sometimes before the end of a length I’d feel so confused and anxious about exhaling that I’d just have to stop. It seems that there is so much tension that when I need large amounts air and yet have to control a long exhalation my reaction is to either block or let it all out rapidly. The whole thing gets confused. It might be that swimming trains you to tolerate a slight air hunger and raises your CO2 levels (hence O2 in the blood), but for me it just seems to expose my dependence on hyperventilation or over breathing. My body just doesn’t seem to tolerate this level of CO2. Whether it’s the breathing itself that is the problem or tension due to technique I can’t decide. Will persevere until I’m relaxed with breathing on 1.5 cycles instead of just 1 cycle on the right side as I usually do. It’s still good training for reduced breathing even if I don’t get far in the swimming itself. Triathlon can just wait a bit longer.
Joined Chris for a light cycling workout, 30km around le Versant du Soleil. Was tired from the hiking yesterday and really felt that in the legs until they warmed up properly. An hour into the workout I was able to attack the final climb up to Macot with an average speed of around 24 km/hr so couldn’t have been all that tired. Was unable to sustain nasal breathing due to talking with Chris. It’s really hard to switch back to nasal breathing once it gets interrupted. When you are engaged in nasal breathing then you can sustain it even at high intensity but otherwise you can’t go in and out of it so easily. I did manage the Macot climb wath nasal breathing because I was on my own by then.
The sore throat hinting at developing the past few days has thankfully gone away.