A great day with the Middle Distance group!

Today I chose to swim with the middle distance group.  I just didn't feel challenged enough in the Sprint group.  The sprinters had the morning off, perhaps to start off the taper season.  I did some heavy lifting on Sunday for work and decided to attend the morning practice to loosen up.  I caught the last portion of the MD workout.  The evening workout began with a very difficult 30 minute ab session.  We were moving almost the entire time with a brutal combination of bicycles, leg lifts, scissors, flutter kicking, situps, crunches, suitcases, toe-touches, and reverse situps.  I was beginning to fail at the end of it... the point at which my abs no longer functioned in a useful manner.  I began the evening pool workout with the sprinters, it was the same workout for all groups.  After warmup the sprint group moved over to the diving well to do a light aerobic workout and o-bands.  Neither of which particuarly excited me.  I chose to stay in the main pool and join the MD group for the afternoon.  I find that neither group is ideal for me at my current capacity.  It seems Sprint is too little training and Middle Distance is too much.  Today was just a single round of threshhold training.  A type of training I feel is especially relevant to the last 50m of my 100m race.  The Sprinters do literally no threshold training.  This seems to work great for nearly all sprinters, I just don't always fit in that group.  I'm really glad I chose the MD set today.  It is written below.  I happened to pick a lane who was training at the "C" interval.  This is the slowest of the interval choices and ideal for my current abilities.  When it comes to training over 100m, I would freely classify myself as one of the least capable swimmers in the pool.  I can honestly say I was just about the slowest athletes in practice today.  That in itself is an indication of how sub-par my abilities are in this specific area of training.  I chose to mix up freestyle and backstroke until the last two 50's and the remaining brown set, all of which I swam butterfly.

I held it together for the whole set, just barely.  My shoulders can't handle more than about 200m fast so the 300's were a bit tough.  The set ended with:

4 x 50m @ :50

With the goal being a 200m time.  I knew I was signing up for some serious pain.  I chose to swim butterfly.  Anybody who has seen me struggle through a 100m race can probably guess I'm not much of a 200m long course butterfly swimmer.  In fact this was my first attempt at it.  It started out a little rough and ended very slowly:

27.2
30.0
33.1
34.2

For a grand total of around a 2:04.5.  Certainly not impressive but not entirely embarassing either considering it was my first attempt.