Another day, another story

Today we did a series of circuit training sets.  The 3 hour morning practice consisted of 1.25 hours of dryland and weights followed by nearly 2 hours of very abstract swim training.  In the weight room we're doing lots of power lifting, very low reps at very hight weight.  I've done alright but I'm definitely one of the weakest in the group regarding how much I can lift.  In the pool we used surgical tubing and a belt tied to the wall while we swam against it.  We did this 10 times with an interesting series of burst sprints built into the set in levels.  Afterward we cycled to do 10x25's underwater with "chutes" and fins on.  The chutes increase resistance but our interval was 1:00 so we had plenty of rest.  Finally we did a fun set of:

• Running on a 12' carpeted section of the deck, diving over a laneline positioned 6' away from the wall, focusing on a shallow dive, doing a full breakout and swiming easy for the remainder of the 25 yards
• Doing 4 pop outs (pulling yourself out of the side of the pool, then dropping down again)
• Wading through the hot tub to stretch our hip flexers
• Doing 20 seconds of vertical kicking while holding onto the 1 meter springboards
• Running 20 feet and doing a flying dive into the water and a full underwater kick to the wall (around 25 yards) for time

The last set was a blast.  It was so new and abstract.  I was about average in the group today.  My 25 yard run/dive/kick time was a 4.84 seconds.  The best was a 4.2 and many guys were high 4's and low 5's.  It was really intersting because I'm not used to running and diving from 1 meter off the water.  In fact I've never done it.  I've run and dove in the water from deck level many times but always fairly slowly so I didn't slip.  Today we had a fair amount of traction so it was safe to run all out!

We finished up with a sprint kick set.  I was slightly above average speed for the group but definitely not the fastest.  I'm incredibly tired and feeling very run down.  I was moving pretty slow leaving practice.  I'm having a lot of fun with this :)