As a lot of triathletes, a big focus of mine in the "offseason" is on swimming. It is especially true since I am slightly faster than a 59 year old Grandma. (It's true, she swims right beside me in the next lane at the Masters group swim). Also, a lot of mornings when it is 16 degrees outside or 34 degrees and raining (my fav!) it is just easier to go to the pool and swim.
So here I am plodding along this January, getting some "volume" in. That's in quotes because volume is all relative. Pretty sure most of my workouts would only qualify as a 'warmup' for
Jenny. Last year I worked on technique. It still stinks, but it's a lot better than last year. I was actually afraid to throw some volume in there because my technique was so bad. A lot of real swimmers (affectionately known as 'fish' in the tri community) will tell you to just swim more. Volume, volume, and more volume. A lot of times they do not quite realize how incredibly awful someone's form could be. So bad to the point that your shoulders hurt (and not in a good way) when you swim too much.
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| I Kinda Felt Like This |
So this January I jumped in with both feet as much as I could. I set personal bests for a single workout yardage, weekly yardage, and monthly yardage. I actually got the swim bug a little bit and looked forward to going to the pool everyday. I swam every 5 days in a row one week (and 8 out 10 days). This barely qualifies as news to a fish, but we're talking about me. I'm the slowest swimmer in the History of Ironman Triathlon ever to qualify for a World Championship. (Look it up.)
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| Garmin Don't Lie (don't judge the time, people) |
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My highlight workout of the month was on my birthday. I've always heard people talk
about birthday workouts, so I decided to do one. It may have been the
first time I actually looked forward to a swim workout. Seriously, like
for 2 weeks I was looking forward to it. I swam 42 x 100's in the pool
that morning. My longest single workout to date. It was kind rough in
the middle, almost more of a mental thing than physical. Especially when you're on
number 28. You're tired and you're thinking, man I'm not even in the 30's yet!
But it felt awesome when I was done. The significance of 4,200 yards
is not lost on me as it is 2.4 miles. Well, technically 4,224 yards is
2.4 miles, but I'm gonna round 2.386 miles up to 2.4 (ok we're kicking
the engineer off the blog for a while, sorry about that).
Ah yes, 2.4 miles. The Ironman swim distance. It is what scares me come September 28th. It is the biggest reason why I am doing the 2.4 Mile OWS race in Chattanooga in May. #faceyourfears
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| Hopefully Not. |
The week of January 6th, I just kinda got the swimming bug. I just felt like swimming every (week) day. I logged 16,150 yards. It definitely could have been more, but the Masters workout on Wednesday was only 2,350 yards. So I still averaged 3,230 yards every time I jumped in the pool. My previous high week was 15K.
So, overall, for the month of January, I logged 64,150 yards. That blows away my previous monthy high of 50,100 yards. For the month I averaged 3,376 yards each swim. Feels good to get a good solid month in, and I still look forward to swimming. I do believe the Masters swims have helped. Anyways, my efforts got a "thumbs up" from this guy:
