With swimming pretty much off the agenda, now is a good opportunity to focus your efforts on the run part of swimrun. Even if you’ve no interest in swimrun, running can help you maintain swim fitness, strength and mobility. Long term, it could help you come back as a stronger swimmer.
If your primary activity is swimming, right now it can feel that your fitness is slipping away. However, we can access and train the different energy systems our bodies use for swimming with other activities and achieve the same fitness goals.
In simple terms, our bodies make energy in three ways: anaerobic alactic (for immediate all out efforts up to about 10s), anaerobic lactic (for sprints and fast efforts up to about 90 seconds) and aerobic (for 90s and beyond). The three systems do not work in isolation. Good all-round fitness training includes activities that incorporates the full range. Even if you’re not a sprinter, the initial moments of any exercise use the shortterm energy system. You may also draw on it for a burst of speed for a sprint finish. Conversely, if you are a sprinter, having a solid aerobic base means you have the stamina to cope with long training sessions. You should therefore do different sorts of run to improve all-round fitness. As a bonus, mixing things up challenges us and helps us stay motivated.