I still haven’t managed to get myself to swim practice on a long course day. In fact, I haven’t managed to get myself to practice more than once a week. Today was only my third time back at practice. It was a fairly small group today. I had my own lane and somehow I wound up getting a shorter interval time than everyone else. It was pretty brutal, but I think I’m not actually fast, but the fast people just were not there today. I’ll keep pushing.

Our coach was down in San Diego last Friday for a conference and expo. She brought back a bunch of different pieces of equipment for us to try out. I got to use these new hand paddles from Speedo that I really liked. They are smaller than my current paddles by quite a bit, so they’re easier to maneuver, but they have a curved lip on the front and inside edge, making them really grab the water. They felt small when they needed to be small, but powerful when they needed to be powerful. Like I said, I really liked them. I don’t see them listed on speedo.com just yet, but I’m guessing I’ll buy some when they start selling them.

As usual, I don’t think I’m remembering everything, but here’s what I think we did:

400 Free warm-up
8 x 50 kick-pull (25 kick, 25 pull) on 0:10 rest
8 X 50 fly kick on our backs (25 hands down, 25 streamline) on 0:50 (with fins)
4 x 50 10-10-10 kicking (both hands out, left out, both out, right out) with hand paddles
12 x 75 swim-drill-swim on 1:05
500 Pull warm-down
—–
2800 yards

Messing around in the pool at Gold’s Gym isn’t the same as a real swim workout. I have known this since the beginning, but it was always so much easier to “swim” at lunch at Gold’s Gym that it would have been to get up at 5:00 to swim before work. Charmaine did get me to the 50m pool in American Fork once last summer, but the masters swim team had just switched their schedule, so we swam alone. That also wasn’t the same as swimming with the real team, with a real coach, etc.

That point was drilled home to me earlier this week when I got in the water the new evening program for masters swimming at American Fork pool. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I haven’t ever swam with any sort of masters program before, and a program at night seems like it might be the swimming equivalent of night classes in college. It may be that equivalent, but it was still all I could handle. We swim from 8:30 to 10:00 Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means tonight will be round 2. I’m still very sore from round 1, but I’m also excited to see if I can survive another workout. I think if I make it through 4 or 5 of these I’ll actually start to improve.

There is a coach that looks like he just finished swimming for some college somewhere, and he seems to know what he’s doing. He watches each of us as we swim and corrects us when we do drills incorrectly, etc. That’s a lot more than I expected. I didn’t even think the morning program would have a coach that attentive (who knows? maybe they don’t?). So I think my $30/month is money well spent.

Tuesday’s workout consisted mostly of kicking exercises, which was a real shame, since I got on the treadmill for the first time in a long time just the day before that. Needless to say, my legs were completely used up after swimming. My flippers must be a little bit too big, because my right foot wound up pretty beat up from all the kicking. I’m guessing we kicked almost 2000 yards and swam another 1000. The coach said we swam 3050 yards. I thought we may have only swam 2650, because we cut the main set short by 400, but he may have taken that into account. We also swam 400 or so before the workout started that I don’t think were counted in that 3050 number, so I’m guessing we did at least that much when all is said and done.