The Pain

To begin, let me mention that in no way am I claiming to endure more pain than any other athlete, I just thought it might be interesting to read what we go through every day.

I'll isolate one average practice.  We begin with stretching, sometimes it's refreshing, other times, it's painful depending on what we did in the days prior.  We'll then move onto dryland training, this involves all sorts of medium impact movements, sometimes jumping up on a 2 foot tall box, sometimes stepping up on it with 30lb weights.  We do lunges with weights... over and over again till our legs burn.  We'll move onto ab workouts which involve minutes on end of leg movements while our bodies are suspended on a bench so our legs have nothing to touch below them.  We hang from rings and lift our legs up, oddly enough, it's our hands that hurt more than our legs, the skin at the base of your fingers gets stretched so hard that your hands are white for minutes afterward.  We do V-ups till we can't move anymore.  We do jumping pullups which put pressure on our spines and in my case, sometimes causing some odd compression issues.  We do power lifting, setting the weight to significantly more than normal and lift it as fast as possible.  Some guys lift so much on the lat pull down machine that the corners of the steel bend upwards.  These guys are pulling down 260lbs.  I'm at a solid 180 and I'm on the light side of the group for sure.  Then we do negative lifting, where we set the weight to maximum, complete a rep, and at the top, a buddy then pulls the weight away from you as you resist them... a crazy new concept to me.  We do many other exercises as well before changing for the pool.  We're dripping with sweat by this time, weights and/or dryland lasts 45 to 75 minutes.

Afterward we prepare for the pool workout, briefly reviewing the printed workout and doing some final stretching.  The pool is always cold.  The entire team dives in within 30 seconds typically.  The funny dives are really the only joking or fun that can be found in a practice.  The first dive itself can be painful, you're still tired from the lifting and when I forget to stretch my neck, I can really tweak my spine in a bad way.  It's happened many times.  Once you're in the water, you spend the next 1 minute just getting used to the cold.  You're swimming slow for the first few hundred meters, just allowing your body to adjust to the temperature and the zero impact of the water.  It's followed by a short kick set.  For me, this comes with some pain due to my arms stretched out on the board, it strains and compresses your spine and puts your shoulder joint in an unnatural position, others don't seem to mind as much.  I do it, but I dislike it.

The pre-main sets almost always include some underwater kicking.  12.5's are easy any day, when we are asked to do 15 meters underwater without fins, it's a little daunting.  You find yourself kicking and running out of air, just hoping to see that second red buoy that indicates the 15 meter mark.  You surface and take a huge breath, just glad that it's over.  Unless they are "race pace breakouts", you can slow it down for a few seconds and relax to prepare for the next one.  Then comes the 25 meter underwaters.  I can speak for any swimmer and say that these aren't "easy" for anybody.  They are 10 meters beyond what is legal in a race so their only purpose is to build up a tolerance for no-breath swimming.  They seem to last forever but they're do-able with some effort.  When the 35 meter underwater swims come up, many swimmers don't make it.  Myself included although I'm improving.  The 35's come within a difficult set so you rarely get any rest beforehand.  You push off underwater, watching the 10 meter buoy pass, then the 15, then the blue bouy's start meaning you're almost half way down the pool (thank goodness, running out of air!).  You see the yellow rope pass indicating the 25 meter mark.  You start swallowing air, almost like a heaving as you near the 35 meter mark.  You surface, almost violently to get that breath of air.  You immediately think about how many more you have to do just like that one. 

Some days we'll do 20 or more starts off the blocks with race pace breakouts.  On the bulkhead side, it's rarely painful, the block surface is plastic with a little grip.  However, on the competition start side, the blocks are downright aggressively surfaced.  It's a 36 grit sandpaper (or less) with channels horizontally moulded into it.  This means that your trailing toe is going to catch one of these sharp channels and do some damage if you're starting fast.  My toe looks like a hungry piranha got some quality time with it today.  Many days within a main set we'll do repeated starts, 15 meters underwater, a race pace breakout and a sprint to 25 meters.  When we stop we're given a time, spoken to us like "Doak ten six".  This indicates that my time off the blocks (probably off my feet) to the 25 meter mark was completed in 10.6x seconds.  I begin a mental database of these times throughout the set to gauge my success against myself and others.  When we complete the 25, we swim to the wall, take a breath and hoist ourselves out.  Many times we are so tired, we can barely get out of the pool, it looks pretty pathetic.  We are gasping for air and we have just exerted our bodies at 100%.  We crawl out, hands, then knees, then slowly stand up and walk back to the blocks.  When we get to the blocks, we have about 10 seconds to gather ourselves and prepare to do it all over again.  We'll do it as few as 4 times, as many as 40 times in a row, sometimes with breaks in the middle.  There are days you're so out of it, you stumble up onto the blocks, almost falling in the water, as you feel the dizziness start to affect your equilibrium.

Other sets we're expected to swim 50 meters without breathing, and do so slowly.  This is my greatest failure so far.  I've only made ONE of them.  Other swimmers have a much better track record.  I start heaving, break down and take a breath at the 40 meter mark.  I know I will improve but it's one of the most painful things thus far.

The 100's "green/purple" pace are very difficult as well.  These are race pace 100's.  You are basically swimming a race every few minutes.  I fall apart at 40 meters and struggle to get to the wall.  I'm almost always at the back of the pack on these sets.  I have poor endurance for a 100 meter race.  All your muscles start burning.  You can't seem to breathe enough and you feel your stroke fall apart.  It's painful

Somehow, I keep coming back for more.  It's been a rough month but I feel myself improving.  I love it

I know it was an unorganized post, but perhaps that gives you a glimpse of what a single workout is like.