My very first week of cross training I discovered something. Swimming is hard. When I started this journey I had no assumptions that any activity I choose would be "easy." I did think that out of all of them swimming would be one of the easier activities.
The reasons I thought it would be easy were simple. To begin with I have some experience swimming. Sure that is experience is limited to one summer in the pool and many more at the river swimming freestyle while canoeing. It is still experience. Second I am in decent shape. As I said I am not where I want to be but I am not 'fat' by any means.
Sadly none of these really helped prepare me for just how hard it is to swim for fitness. As I mentioned I am in decent shape. My legs less fat then any other part of my body. What this means in the water is that my legs are constantly pulling me down to the bottom of the water. This makes it very difficult to swim and, as of right now, impossible to do the back stroke.
I am nowhere near reaching any of my goals. I have made it two laps swimming freestyle but then had to rest for ten seconds to start the next one and a whole minute before I could finish it. I have same half a lap doing the breast stroke but haven't been able to do a back stroke or the butterfly.
As far as my parkour training is coming a long. The first day of conditioning was almost a waste of time. I had planned an intense day of upper body conditioning and top out practice but, after the first day of swimming I was so tired that I could do one climb up and a few cat hang pull ups. I instead decided to have a light day of ankle conditioning.
I was unprepared for just how tired the swimming would make me. My lower back was sore and my shoulders are already more defined after one week but my muscles were just so fatigued I couldn't do as much as I wanted.
Swimming has indeed helped my flexibility and has also strengthened my hips. I plan on leaving out one pool day next week and instead practicing the strokes on dry land to try and get the motions down. If anyone has any good swimming tutorials leave them in the comments please! After next week I will have a concrete swimming workout I will post here.
I do have one confession. I have been trying to watch my diet very carefully. I am doing paleo, with one exception -cheese. I cheated Tuesday and Friday. Friday I purchased Oreos but, they were double decker chocolate mint Oreos. I also has potato chips. The reason I cheated Friday was because my sister is quitting smoking and it is my job to sit with her and distract her with "comfort food." Tuesday, I cheated because my fiance really wanted dairy queen and I don't care how healthy you are. When your betrothed wants Ice Cream, you get the ice cream.
Thanks for reading!
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