Get comfy

I took an unplanned break from posting.  I found myself fairly overloaded with work and life to write.  The past two weeks has been very refreshing.  With the U of M team and the Post Grads on a training trip to the Florida Keys, it was up to me to find a team to train with.  Luckily Club Wolverine (High School group) welcomed me with open arms.  It worked out quite well in many ways.  The holiday brought home some very talented college and post college swimmers from across the country.  I unexpectedly found myself training with multiple swimmers with National or Olympic Trial cuts!  The practices, written by CW head coach Kelton Graham were right up my alley.  If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm a big fan of Kelton.  He is a fellow EMU grad and a skilled coach.  I feel he takes the best of EMU's head  coach (and his former coach) Peter Linn and combines it with his unique personality which results in a fun and challenging training environment.

It was a great change of pace to actually train with a team.  Since the college team was out of town, the high school squad trained at Canham in Ann Arbor.  It worked out perfect for me.  I was able to train at the same time and the same pool with others, how revolutionary!

My training competition was an interesting situation.  After months of being in the middle of the pack at CW, I was either the fastest, or among the fastest in the pool.  Please understand I'm not bragging, I simply found myself training with much younger and physically smaller swimmers.  There were moments I really enjoyed the fact that my 80% effort exceeded the times of every swimmer in the pool.  Other times I noticed that I could have really used a similar speed swimmer next to me to push me.  Yet overall, I think I pushed myself just as much as I needed to, I really feel the benefits from the more middle distance geared workouts I got by working with Kelton.

Kelton puts adequate emphasis on kick sets, something I've consistently felt was lacking at CW Elite.  The kick sets are JUST what I need in my opinion.  There was a kick set which went something like this:

4 x 100's @ 1:40
400 MAX
3 x 100y @ 1:40
300 MAX
2 x 100y @ 1:40
200 MAX
1 x 100y @ 1:40
100 MAX

I lead the entire set, hitting the wall in 5:09 on the first 400, followed by a 3:40 finish in the 300 and a 2:16 time in the 200 and a final 100 in 1:05.  Each swim was a lifetime best with a board and the 200, 300 and 400 was a lifetime best with or without a board.  It was a brutal set but I loved every second of it.

My 50's yesterday were meters.  I was holding 28's on the backstroke, and 28's on fly.  My freestyle was a 25.8 and my last fly was a 26.4... just blazing for me. 

I hope to get to a more regular posting schedule again, just crazy busy lately.  I do write here as much for my own training log as much as to just share with the world what a swimmer in my situation experiences.  Thanks for reading