Celtman, Coffee, Cake and a Collie

Last week my Garmin surprised me after an outdoor bike session with an increase in my FTP: Functional Threshold Power, or the amount of effort I can theoretically sustain.   The following day, it told me my 'Lactate Threshold' for running had gone up a bit, too.   That got me thinking... Has my swim speed improved?  How will I know?  I learned to swim more than a length of front crawl for the first time in 2022.  Then on July 6th this year when I started working on my front crawl in earnest, I did a 'Critical Swim Speed test'.   As a novice front crawl swimmer, it was just a place to start, somewhere to begin improving my technique and swim fitness.  It told my that my front crawl 'CSS' - again, the pace I can sustain - was 3 minutes 49 seconds per 100m.   Since then I've worked hard, swimming regularly, using the Zen8 trainer, completing my Brownlee Fitness workouts with my Form goggles, and most importantly, having coaching with Sarah from Beyond the Water

  My first word, apparently, was 'boat'.   I've been around water all my life: sailing, swimming, kayaking... but I learned to swim breaststroke as a very small child, and became a very strong breaststroke swimmer.  As a result, I never really learned front crawl - I kind of didn't need to.  Most of my water sports have been 'on' water rather than in it, and my breaststroke was strong enough I could hold my own whenever I needed to swim, or to swim for some exercise in the pool.  Most recently, until a couple of years ago I spent most of my days- both working and for fun- in a kayak.  Photos: Sean Orchard So having taken up triathlon, and I started to wonder if I needed to learn front crawl.  At first, there didn't seem much point - my front crawl was scrappy and significantly slower than my breaststroke.  I could barely manage a length of front crawl in the pool without stopping and spluttering for breath. I started to learn, though, but was still very slow