Swim Pactice

I've been a bad boy when it comes to swimming. And it shows...

Since the swim center is closed during the month of August every year, I take that month off and try to swim on my own. I had the best of intentions this year, but somehow it didn't really happen. I swam a little bit, about once a week. But not much more than that.

Now that UT is open again, I've started trying to get back in the habit of going in the mornings. Now that I'm back at a job in an office again, the noon practices really aren't an option. So if I'm going to swim, it will have to be in the mornings. But somehow, with my Tuesday and Thursday mornings taken up with early runs, I'm finding it difficult to convince myself to get up in time for swim practice at 6:30.

I did make it today. This is the third time in the last three weeks, only once a week. I'm not going to improve my swimming like that, but let's get through the marathon and then we'll see. I have some big ideas to improve my swimming this winter, but I'm discovering that it's really hard to do that while doing serious running too.

Anyway, I guess because the pool isn't in big use these days, probably because now that the Olympics are over the men and women aren't as interested in killing themselves every day, so the pool isn't in such demand. So this is the second of the three workouts I've attended that Whitney has used the whole pool for some sort of creative workout. Today it was 500 yard "snakes" i.e. starting at one end of the pool and swimming a 25 in one lane and then moving to the next lane and so on covering 20 lanes by the time it's all over (i.e. all lanes in the pool except for the two outermost). Then out of the water at one end and walk back to the other end and do it all over again.

We did nine of these snakes total. If memory serves me they were:

1. swim
2. 100 strong / 25 easy
3. IM
   
4. pull, 3 breaths per lap
5. kick with fins
6. 25 best / 25 worst (I did free/back)
7. 100 free / 25 fast, IM order
8. pull, breathe every 5th
9. fast, for time.

My "for time" was 6:54. That's pathetic, but given how little I've been in the pool, and how tired I was after racking up 4500 yards, it's no surprise.

In the end, it was over 5000 yards. Even for a Whitney workout, that's pretty ambitious. Usually if we cross the 5000 threshold it means we're a) swimming a lot of free and b) not spending much time resting. Those were definitely both true for this workout!