Paul Arden | Tuesday, 23 July 2024
That’s right, Tuesday is the first day of the week for me. It’s a bit difficult juggling everything at the moment. There are the Hot Tortugas being built, and keeping on top of that. The new website being developed. All my Zoom students to keep up with, many who appear to be fishing at the moment. There is my own fishing of course; I spent an hour trying to get a decent position/shot at some adults last night and got three resulting follows but no eat (sometimes that happens). And then the big thing right now is the Malaysian Ironman coming up in October.
This is the time to really push through and build endurance. I had a 5hr 15min indoor bike ride on Saturday night, which I will increase by 15 minutes/week up to 6hrs. I followed that up with a 21km run on Sunday. I think I’ll start to lengthen this up too, but that’s more difficult to recover from. And then there is swimming. On Saturday I swam 67 metres! And all of this happens in heat. The boat is 30C in the evening. The run was 32C. The water temp is 32C. The humidity is through the roof. The big challenge is to replace fluids lost as sweat. Despite drinking 2 litres of fluid on the run, I still came back 2.4KG lighter. Over a marathon off the bike, those numbers are going to be difficult.
Hmmm 67m swim…. OK so my focus for the next three months is to build endurance on both bike and run, and also to really work on my swimming now. Swimming is like flycasting, it’s all about technique. Unfortunately I’m not very good at swimming.
I’m reading an interesting swim coaching book at the moment. I got interested in it because I heard an interview with the author where I recognised the use of external cues as well as the use of “old way/new way”. And I don’t find these very often discussed or taught in swimming. I’m about half way through the book now and it’s very interesting. Lots of coaching ideas to think about.
In the same way that everything in life comes back to fly fishing, it turns out that the reason other sports exist, is so that we can learn to be better fly fishing coaches from their coaches. It’s amazing when you think about it really. The reason that Olympic swimming exists at all, is so that we can learn from their coaches, how to better coach our fly casting students. Everything comes back to fly fishing. It’s the central hub of the Universe. All these little stars are interconnected with the central star which is fly fishing, the meaning of life. We don’t really need the other stars but they are there for us, and they also help stop the rivers from becoming overcrowded. In fly fishing two is a crowd.
I have a roll cast training video to upload… actually I’ve got a roll cast video to shoot first and then upload. The plan was to do it today but it’s important to be adaptable in life and so I’ll do it later this week. Possibly tomorrow. I’ve planned it in my mind.
Today’s POD is a “news” story one of my early fishing trips. At the time I had no idea I would be publishing this exciting adventure almost 5 decades later. As has been pointed out by others, it appears my handwriting has long since gone backwards. I don’t remember this trip from the description, but I do remember another story when I fell off a horse. Another childhood classic.
And no I didn’t keep these books, but my mother has and has been sending them to be while she has been clearing out her house!
Have a great week!
Cheers, Paul