Swimming Again

I've been swimming with a proper masters team for three weeks and am starting to feel a little better in the water. I last swam this consistently back in the Spring '07 so its been a while.

This masters team has 4 or 5 guys who are in to long distance open water swimming, so while their not speed burners they can grind it out at a good tempo and we tend to do what I'd call mid distance type sets. I've enjoyed pacing with them in workouts and watching my abilities to hang improve with each workout.

I'm still on that steep part of the improvement curve, which is fun.

We're on temporary hiatus from our normal pool, which is fine with me because the water at our normal spot was way to hot for anything up-tempo. The new pool is cooler, 25 yards (as opposed to meters), but doesn't have a pace clock so I have no idea what sort of pace I'm holding. It probably isn't anything spectacular, but I'm getting better with each session and can see some swimmer shoulders starting to peek out a bit.

This morning I got in 3,100 before I hopped out. I'm planning to run for an hour tonight and wanted to make sure that happened and that I didn't leave it all in the pool. This is what we did:

400 Reverse IM
12x75 alternating free/backstroke
4x400 alternating swim/pull
200 warm down

Nothing too creative, but I don't care as long as their are other people there doing it with me.

I'm off to New Hampshire on Thursday of next week to spend a week on the lake. I'd signed up to do Timberman 70.3, but down-gauged to the sprint distance race after not getting off my ass in time to get fit. I've got 8 weeks until Longhorn 70.3 in Austin, so I'm game planning to have a decent showing there. It would be nice to dip under 6 hours but I'm not sure if a 10 week build off of a 6 week hiatus on the couch will be enough.

Who cares I guess. Just looking forward to going long.