Started the week with a swim!

As planned I went to the pool on Monday morning, I hoped I had everything you need, Towel, Speedos... but as I got to the pool edge... goggles! Bah never mind, also my first swim in years and a first for using the Apple Watch.

The watch did very well and accurately counted the laps and was a breeze, the days of trying to remember what lap you are on and what time did you start swimming again... Not anymore.

I am using rungo with its "swagbag" to export to Strava, I am not happy that Strava does not support the Apple Watch natively and that when you do have rich data from Apple Health, rungo imports it fine, but once its gets there Strava holds minimal data.



So as I had trained in the pool in the morning I fancied a blast on the turbo so did 15k again but this time found a good gear and enjoyed the ride.



Unfortunately I planned to go for a 5k run but could not fit it in so finished the week with a 15 minute 145 bpm turbo session, finally got the cadence sensor just right thanks to a video on youtube.


So getting back into some sort of fitness regime, this week I will try to use the turbo trainer up to Wednesday night as from Thursday I am on a holiday to Nuremberg, Germany so have packed my running stuff for parkrun on Saturday!

Back on the turbo trainer

Since I am struggling to run and the weather not exactly nice for running, I decided to dust off the old Tacx Flow turbo trainer.

Quite a struggle as it is that old it only uses USB and the software I had only ran on Windows 7, also the licence is tied to the laptop it was installed on.
As luck would have it I found the laptop, the screen does not work and was well behind on patches and anti-virus so took ages to get running, plus the Tacx software incrementally updates so had to go from 3.7 to 3.12.

The first few sessions worked well and decided to invest in a Heart Rate Monitor, again the unit being so old it does not use Bluetooth or ant+ so after research managed to find the "Sigma Analogue" HRM on Amazon.

So today managed to get 15km done and it works as if was 5 years ago! The process to get the workout into Strava a little convoluted as I have to export to a Polar HRM format, then use a converter to change it to a Garmin TCX file and then finally upload to Strava!

If I keep up the effort, I will buy a newer turbo trainer that connects via bluetooth to an iPad. Then I can us Zwift which a great training app and puts you on virtual courses, races etc.

So for this week I will attempt some swimming on Monday and a run on Thursday to complement the turbo sessions.