Ah, Master's Swimming

Well, my grunginess propelled me to the pool, and now I am sparkly clean and have water draining from my sinuses.

I also realized that my pants are too big so my underwear are hanging out the top (thankfully, I have a long shirt on, but I am constantly hiking these suckers up), and the fleece I grabbed, straight out of the drier although already folded and put away, has a sort of static-y clingy inside where another pair of underwear were clinging to the inner sleeve. I discovered this as I changed into my swim suit in the locker room. Thankfully, no one noticed, but apparently my underwear really want to make an appearance today. And I guess now I have a spare. You know, just in case. So that's good.

So Master's swimming, at least the Master's swimming I have done (not at UCSC) usually involves a coach on the deck who tells you the workout and gives you input and makes sure you're doing okay and it's a very interactive thing. Well, as interactive as swimming can be. This workout was a little different. The workout was written on a white board, which was spectacular, but there was little explanation, and each coach has their own vernacular swim language. So you'll understand my confusion when I read something like 2 X 100; 1-10-beat/ 2-catch-up. Now, I know what 2 X 100 means (two 100-yard swims), what catch-up means, but 10-beat? And the 1 and 2? WTF? (Okay, it meant the first 100 was 10-beat, which I will spare you the boring explanation of, and the second was catch-up. Duh. But still, a verbal explanation would have been nice.) I was the moron asking everyone in the pool for clarification, since the coach (assistant coach?) mostly just sat and socialized on the deck. I finally gave up trying to understand and just swam last in my lane of really fast people and did what they did. This from someone who has been swimming for years and years. Come on, if I can't get it something's not right.

I also miscalculated my lane; lanes go from slow on the right (yes, there is slow in Master's swimming, unlike TNT! Also, anyone pick up on the fact that TNT didn't want to use the REAL acronym for Team In Training? I find that funny.) to fast on the left. We had five lanes, so I jumped in the second-slowest. I like to underestimate my speed and move up instead of the other way around, and figured that would be a good place to start. However, after we'd begun our warm-up, we lost the last lane to the recreational swimmers and were down to four. Now, I was in the slowest lane, and it rapidly became obvious that I was in the wrong place. The coach (who again mostly sat and chatted with people), who I sort of expect should be watching for this kind of thing, finally placed me in the second-fastest lane (woo hoo!). Which actually might not have been the right placement either - I probably should have been in the lane one notch down, but damn was that a good workout!

Not that I could tell you what I actually swam - there was a warm-up set, but I was so confused by my lane placement and trying to swim around people that I ended up skipping some of it and asking the coach if I should wait for my lane or just do the sets on my own. (That's when he suggested a proper lane for me - clearly I need to be more proactive about moving around. I'm just really sensitive to being the way slowest one in a lane, don't know anyone, and swimming can be kind of like surfing - a bit territorial. I didn't want to step on anyone's toes and was trying to gauge lane speeds...) I'm going to guess the warm-up set for me involved about 600 meters (oh yes, and it was long course, which means one length is 50 meters instead of 25 yards = less flip turns = WAY more swimming = good for my training but a little scary at my first day of Master's), and the main set was as follows:

4 X 50, descending free (I have no idea what interval we were on, I just swam when everyone else swam)
2 X 100, 50 backstroke 50 breaststroke (did I mention I hate breaststroke? This was a weird combination of my best and worst strokes, where I ended up on the toes of the woman in front of me on the backstroke and then gasping to keep up on the breaststroke.)

We did three sets of those, with a 100 after the first set, a 200 after the second set, and a 300 after the third set. I got my ass kicked by my lane on the 300.

So that's an 1800 meter main set, most of which I was swimming hard. Add the ~600 warm-up (that might be an underestimate) and I went ~2400 yards of pretty hard swimming.

There was a kick set at the end but most people, including myself, got out instead.

Now, back at work, sniffling and hoping there's no more stealthy underwear lurking in my clothes today.