Distance Swimming

Every Monday (and Wednesday, but I play water polo Wednesdays so can't go) there is an extra swim workout for the die-hards. Or for the swimmers. I don't consider myself a die-hard but I do consider myself a swimmer.

Anyway, it's been a bunch of middle-distance stuff, ladder workouts, strole drills. I've been wanting to get in some solid distance swimming, just a get-in-and-go kind of a thing, and last night we finally had it.

The pool, because it is a holiday week, is set up long-course (I don't get the correlation, but whatever), which means instead of one length of the pool being 25 yards it's now 50 meters. Awesome! Except that I am REALLY good at flip turns, so less turns = more/slower swimming, but it's great training for this tri thing we've all signed up for.

Anyway, the coach/mentor brought red plastic cups that we all wrote our names on, and he brought hershey's kisses so at each lap we could stop and drop in a kiss as a counter. That was a great idea, but after two laps and two kisses in my cup, I realized that stopping so much was defeating the puropse of the swim and I gave up kiss-counting. I tried to keep track with my watch but ended up screwing that up too, and lost count at something like 18 100s (so 1800 meters). I swam for almost an hour solid (years ago I finished a 2.2-mile/3540 meter ocean swim in 56 minutes, but I am not as fast as I was then so...), and when I stopped the people in my lane were all laughing because the coach had run out of kisses. He'd been adding them to my cup for me and they were staying all the kisses were in my cup. Actually, they were joking that they were going to make me stop and eat one after every lap to slow me down. I didn't actually count but was over 3000 meters by then, so was pretty happy about that. It's nice to be relatively good at something, I have to admit, especially since I am so slow at the other two legs of this thing.

I ended up hopping out and doling out my kisses to the other swimmers, since I didn't want to actually eat a cup full of chocolate. I mean, I wanted to, but my jeans don't want me to.

I'm enjoying those workouts, but because there are so many ability levels we're not doing interval-based swimming. So, instead of saying, "Do 10 x 100 on 1:40" we're doing 10 x 100 (or whatever) with 10 seconds rest, or 20 seconds rest, between. It makes cruising a lot easier and I find myself not working super hard. I have my swimming stuff with me today but don't know if I'll have time to fit a quick workout in, but if I can I'm going to really focus on interval-based swimming and push myself. I'm certainly faster than I was when I began but my arms feel heavy and my technique feels sloppy. I think I need Master's swimming to fix me up.

Tonight is also a track workout - those are always a challenge for me, mostly because I hate going in circles and also because I hate it when the super fast people go blowing by me. I guess that's what I get for passing people in the pool though, huh?

I am still in my size 8 jeans and I tried on a bunch of my other pants this morning only to realize that I now only have three or four pairs that fir properly, and only two of those I deem work-worthy. The other two are too nice to wear in here, even if I do wear a lab coat! I might treat myself to one more pair that I like, we'll see.

Now, back to work! Gels are running and there is writing to be done!