Failing to plan is planning to fail

Ages ago I brought the Swim Smooth DVD. I watched most of it and looked through the workout plans they provided and descriptions of the drills and thought this is exactly what I need. A progressive way to improve my swimming technique without having to rebuild it from scratch.

Obviously this was going to be a very useful and important tool so I put into into my laptop bag where it has been waiting for me ever since. Well it is waiting no longer. This morning I did the first session of the novice program that came with the DVD. Essentially a few warm ups followed by a 400m time trial to provide a baseline to measure progress against. Session two will be tomorrow morning.

Since I have started training for triathlons I have not been following a plan and have not really managed to get myself into a routine. The lack of structure to my training has been reducing the benefits I get from it. It also makes it very easy to miss sessions when you don't have a plan of what you were going to do anyway. When I played rugby I knew which nights I had organised training, when I was going to go the the gym, what sessions I was going to do when I got there, when I was going to go running, etc. A lot of it wasn't written down but the plan was very clear in my head and I knew what I was going to do in any particular session, skipping sessions just didn't enter into the equation.

Now is the time for me to start getting that sort of organisation and discipline into my triathlon training. Swimming is my weakness and I had a ready made plan for it so that is the first area that I am going to get organised. Now I just need to try and figure out some sort of structured plan for the rest of my training. Most importantly of all I need to stick to the plan!