Thursday, December 24, 2015

Fourth Swim in Two Months

Tuesday night I swam for only the third time this December and the fourth time since the first of November. I didn't plan it this way, and I'm not even sure how it happened, but if you have been reading this blog, you know EndangeredSwimmer has read more like EndangeredRunner. I hope all of that is about to change.

Not that I plan to slow down the running. Quite the opposite. I hope to continue to run at a high volume (for me), and the lifting is starting to climb back up, although I am behind last year's pace there also.

To say I'm getting antsy would be an understatement. Antsy, however, is a good thing because it causes me to press, work, scheme to catch up, to get in shape, to prepare. Besides these two slim months, the whole fall has been way down so much that just a casual glance at this year's and last year's training diaries show me to be over 200,000 meters behind last year's pace. One reason for the shortfall was due to me dropping Swim the Suck this time around. That knocked out my Fall ramp up. But I now have something I was fearing I might not have: desire. I am ready to train, and I'm ready to train hard. I just need water and opportunity.

Being out of swim shape made Tuesday's practice unusually tough. The pool was unexpectedly set up for long course, which normally I love, but when one is not fit, a 50 meter pool is extremely tiring in a hurry. To make matters worse, I got almost no warm up because coach inboxed us to tell us not to get there early, the pool is closed, he said and you will only wait outside until I get there he told us. I arrived for practice on time to a pool full of swimmers and my only teammate already in the water for twenty minutes. Huh? What I did was

300 warm up (they were ready to start)
600 small paddles plus breathing pattern
400 breathing pattern?
2 X 200 breathing pattern?
4 X 100 slow and fast
4 X 50 fast and slow
100 cool down
total: 2,400 LCMs.

That afternoon, I ran 6.17 miles with three .25s thrown in at sub-5K race pace. I followed that with some lower body weightlifting. I slept well Tuesday night.

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