The people in charge of weather prediction continue telling me how cold and dark each new day will be. When I wake up each morning it seems like they may be right, but then the sun burns away all the fog. It turned out to be beautiful and warm today and I wanted to go swimming. So that’s what I did.
200 free warm-up
3 x 100 kicking
5 x 100 free with fins
4 x 200 IM with fins
2 x 200 pulling
4 x 50 kicking
4 x 50 dolphin kick with fins
100 free warm-down
—–
2500 yards
It has been really foggy the last few mornings, including today. When it was lunch time and time to swim, I looked outside… still foggy. It was warm, but one of the things I enjoy the most about swimming outside is the sun. Of course, I walked down to the pool anyway. There were already a couple swimmers in the water and a foggy mist rising up out of the pool. I wished I had a camera or even my phone to snap a picture of it. It was really cool.
2 x 100 warm-up
10 x 100 free @ 1:25 on 1:45
100 easy
8 x 50 kicking on 10 seconds rest
300 pulling
2 x ( 50 fly drill, 50 dolphin kick ) with fins
100 free fast with fins
100 warm-down
—–
2400 yards
I swam outside today at the Carmel Valley Rec Center. It’s not all that amazing that I can swim outside in San Diego in March, but the feeling of swimming outside today was amazing. I’m still terribly slow and out of shape, but I’m still very much a swimmer.
5 x 100 Free
4 x 100 Kick
3 x 100 Pull
200 IM with fins
100 Free with fins
100 easy
10 x 50 Free @ 0:40 on 1:00
100 easy
—–
2200 yards
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
Monday was a holiday, so there was no swim practice. Yesterday they swam long course, and I wasn’t really ready for that kind of pain. Today I made it back to morning practice. I’m sort of sad that I waited till summer was over to start swimming again. I really enjoy swimming as the sun comes up, but that won’t happen again until next year. We’re already too far into fall… and they’ll be putting the bubble over the pool soon. Oh well, at least I’m swimming again.
100 free warm-up
2 x (
8 x 25 kicking on 0:40
20 x 25 drill with fins on 0:30 (5 x fly, 5 x back, 5 x breast, 5 x free)
4 x 100 free on 1:30 (no fins)
)
400 pull easy warm-down
-----
2700 yards
A strange confluence of events over the past week or two led me to the pool in the middle of the night. It all started when I swam a few yards at Gold’s Gym. Then my old Masters Swim Team coach sent an email saying he was back from living in Texas and wanted to have a reunion with some of the old swimmers. We had everyone that could make it over for a pot-luck dinner… and by the end of the night I had committed to swimming “at least once” in the morning. That morning was this morning. And this morning I realized that “morning” has a completely different definition than I thought it did.
We got up around 5:10. Practice started at 5:30. Somehow getting up at 5:10 was not early enough to get us in the water on time. I don’t think we were very late, but we were at least a little late. It was still pitch black outside when we got in the pool.
I swam in the same lane as my old coach, Dave. As our warm-up was ending, we were joined by Keena, a local triathlon coach. Having not been in the water for a real workout in several years, I was a little uncomfortable. Somehow Dave and Keena managed to drang and push me through the main set. There’s a lot of pressure to perform when you have a coach 10 seconds ahead of you and another coach 10 seconds behind you. Somehow I stayed alive.
The first hints that it may not be night after all came as we were warming down. The horizon was just starting to turn from black to purple. We finished up, dried off, and drove all the way home before the sun ever came up. That’s just not right. And somehow I’ve gotten myself on the hook to be back at practice on Tuesday, when we’ll be doing LCM (Long Course Meters), which is much harder than the SCY (Short Course Yards) we did today.
I didn’t take any notes, but here’s at least most of what we did today:
6 x 200 pull
12 x hammer-down
6 x 50 russian free
6 x 50 drill your-choice
12 x 25 kick @ 0:40
500 pull
I need to get a kick board. I wasn’t happy using my pull buoy as a kick board.
All the big events I was signed up for are now done for the year. We rode our bikes from Seattle to Portland, did the Spudman triathlon, and rode our bikes around Utah Lake in the ULCER. This week we got to watch a couple stages of the Tour of Utah, which was really cool. But now the big events are done and I have to stop using my “I don’t want to underfuel for the next big event” excuse. It’s time to reinstate the restricted calorie diet. That’s going to be tricky now that we have a Blendtec. It’s so easy to whip up a big smoothie in the morning, but those smoothies have hundreds of calories. I guess I just need to put in more vegetables and less fruits. We’ll see.
It’s been a really long time since I’ve been in a pool to swim laps. That’s sort of funny and sort of sad, considering this is my “swim” blog. But the fact is that the last time I swam any distance was in the Spudman Triathlon last year.
Today we went to the Lindon Aquatic Center, which had been rented out by Charmaine’s work for a party. We took the opportunity to swim a few laps in the 25 yard lap lane pool. It was an eye opening experience. I couldn’t swim more than a 200 without stopping. That is just terrible. I didn’t let myself get out of the pool until I had gone a full mile. By the end I was stopping every 50 yards to catch my breath and let my arms recover.
If it wasn’t before, the message is certainly clear now: we can’t afford to stay away from the pool if we want to survive the Spudman this year.
We finally made it back to swim practice. Well, we made it for part of practice. I just can’t seem to get there by 7:30, and I’m not exactly sad about missing out on the dryland training (although that probably means the dryland training would help me even more than the swimming does, but let’s not get into that).
It was nice to get back in the pool. It was nice to be swimming long course. We did more pulling than we have ever done before, and my shoulders are feeling it. I asked it I can bring my paddles for pulling in the future. Coach Dave said it would be ok. We’ll see if he still agrees after he sees how big they are.
After the pull sets, the guards switched the pool from long course to short course, and we finished up short course. It turned out to be really nice. I was in the most western lane of the team, with several empty lanes to the west of me… which was beautiful to swim next to as the sun went down.
Pull Set (900):
6 x 50 Pulling on 1:15 (2 sprint, 1 easy)
6 x 50 Pulling on 1:10 (2 sprint, 1 easy)
6 x 50 Pulling on 1:10 (2 sprint, 1 easy)
Fly Set (300):
6 x 75 Fly drill on 1:15 with fins (3 right, 3 left, 2 full)
6 x 75 Fly drill on 1:15 with fins (1 right, 1 full, 1 left, 1 full)
I got back from vacation to find the bubble had been removed from the pool. That’s great news. I absolutely love swimming outdoors. Unfortunately, it means the new summer schedule is in effect; the pool now closes at 9:00 instead of 10:00. The team has switched their schedule as well. They’re now swimming from 7:30 to 9:00 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I don’t know what that will mean for me in the long run, but I’m guessing it could mean switching to a new team. I don’t think I can be finished with work early enough to get to practice by 7:30, and there’s no sense paying for time wasted. We’ll see how it turns out.
As for this week, I didn’t know the new schedule was in effect, so I showed up to an empty pool at 8:20. It looked like there may have been an age-group swim meet earlier that day. They were taking down tables and chairs around the pool. I figured practice must have been cancelled because of it, but the pool was wide open so I got in and swam. 15 minutes later, Andrea and Jann showed up and swam a bit with me. We only did about 1500 before the pool closed on us (at 9:00), but it was still fun. Jann is really fast, but I learned that she used to swim Butterfly and sprint freestyle for BYU.
The practice hadn’t actually been cancelled; the team was doing dryland exercises inside. I’m sort of glad I missed that.
Warm-Up (400):
4 x 100 Free easy
Main Set (1000):
1 x 400 Free
1 x 200 IM Drill with fins
1 x 100 Free (25 easy, 25 fast, 25 easy, 25 fast)
1 x 100 Stroke (25 breast, 25 back, 25 breast, 25 back)
1 x 100 Drill (25 breast, 25 fly, 25 back, 25 free)
1 x 100 Free (25 easy, 25 fast, 25 easy, 25 fast)
Warm-Down (100):
2 x 50 Free easy