October 2010

I've been recognizing my general lack of consistency in training lately. I would consider my 2007 and 2008 seasons to be the finest of my modern swimming career. The one thing I definitely accomplished in my training was consistency. Every week I aimed to train 7 days a week. I set this goal knowing that something would always come up once a week that would prevent me from training whether it be life, work or a family event. I remember how well it worked for me. I was swimming 3k a day, 6 days a week and racing really well from that level of training.

Today I trained at a community pool alongside a special needs group. It was a fantastic experience! Never have I ever seen more helpful, fun loving people in one pool. I saw nothing but smiles for an hour straight. As a group they were friendly and pleasant to be around. I had a few offer to help me with the lane lines and others just wanted to cheer for me! They were polite and loved saying hi and talking about the pool. It was a really positive experience! I think this reflects heavily on their parents and mentors who taught them to respect people and enjoy life.

First impression:

Mason has a fantastic facility! I was really impressed. It was a new (2006) clean facility that was designed really well for training as well as meets. It was deep enough for racing and had a great gutter design. I expected some fast times based on the facility. I was glad to see some of my favorite MSU Alumni in attendance and that in itself made the meet that much more fun. I swam the 200 Medley Relay, the 50 Fly, 100 Free and 200 Free Relay.

Practicing with EMU has not been ideal. I think it has its pros and cons but since I'm not allowed to actually train with the group, it seems more of a waste lately. Today I was literally 22 lanes away from the group whom I shared my practice and intervals with. For these and other reasons I will probably utilize Eastern as more of an occasional training option.

I just watched a video of my 100 Back from this weekend. It was really quite sad! I'm typically proud of my swims because I give it my all and I'm just swimming against myself. In this race, I was just exhausted and flopping around in the water. It was literally about 7 seconds slower than I wanted to swim the race. You can actually tell I'm barely trying. I'm looking forward to redeeming myself in a race sometime soon!

I took the day off to rest up for a solid week of training. I really cranked my neck (as usual) during the meet. Someday I will learn to stretch prior to racing.

I recently launched a new swimming website for Michigan Masters Swimmers! It's something I've been meaning to do for a while. I have thousands of pictures taken at these meets and until now I haven't had a good way to share them with fellow swimmers. Check it out:

www.miswim.com

The workout today was all about kicking both above and underwater. I've noticed there is a ton of leg work in these workouts, which I'm a huge fan of! We were doing:

4 x [4 x 75's (25 underwater + 50 big kick free) + 4 x 25's Surf Kick + 200 Free Drill + :30 vertical kick)]

Which was the main set, on top of about 1,600 yards of other kicking. The whole 4,400 yard workout took 2 hours because there was so much rest and short distances. I liked the variety!

I was waaay short on time. I busted out 2,000 SCY in about a half an hour, followed by some starts. Better than nothing! I'm feeling stronger in the water lately. I'm looking forward to perhaps trying a 100 Free this weekend for the heck of it. Historically I've always swam too many events at Milan. Last year, due to low attendance I swam 6 events about 10-15 minutes apart. I was just ruined after the 3rd event. I had no idea it was going to be that close together, it was a good learning experience.

I skipped yesterday for work issues but I was back in the water today.  Although I'm not near the sprint group, I've enjoyed being among other athletes working as hard as I am.  Somehow it just seems to help during difficult sets to know that there's about 70 other people going through exactly what your'e going through.  It's been really difficult to actually GET to practice with life and work taking up so much time lately.  I'll get through it.