First hint of summer (pool) training

As I've said before, I'm planning to go big at Summer Nats in July, my original intent being to swim the 100/200 fly, 100/200 back, and 200/400 IM.  Unfortunately, the 100 fly is right after the 400 IM, so I might have to forego the 100.  I can do the 50 fly instead, but it's right before the 200 IM.  With how many heats there should be (last year there were 21 heats of the 50 fly and 15 of the 200 IM, and I'd be in the last or second to last heat of both), that is a doable time gap between races.  Probably 45 minutes to an hour between the 50 fly and the 200 IM, plenty of time for me to cool down and rest.

Anyways, my big events are the 200 fly, 200 back, and 400 IM.

400 IM: This is going to be the biggest beast, and the most challenging to train for.  Breaststroke really isn't my thing, so I'll have to do a significant amount of breast in practice before I'm ready to pull my weight in a 100 breast in that event.  In addition, one of my biggest takeaways from spring Nats a few weeks back was that I still have a lot to work on to get my back end speed up and increase my overall endurance.  I'm pretty confident that I'll have a decent first half of the race, but right now the second half would be very rough.

200 fly: I swam this once during the short course season, back at the beginning of March.  I didn't have a very good swim, and was tired from a hard week of practices, to boot.  I went a 2:32.90, and was totally dead at the end.  Due to long days and the stress of work wiping me out on the shorter days last week (I was wrapping up the project I've been slaving over the past six months), I was out of the water for about a week and a half, and just got back in this Tuesday evening.  It doesn't take more than a few days for me to lose my touch in the water, so I felt pretty weak and felt my endurance give out about halfway through the practice.  Anyhoo, the main set included 6 x 200 race pace (there were three rounds of the set, with 2 x 200 at the end of each round), the first round was fly, second was back, and the third was free.  I burned out right before the first fly 200, so I was running on fumes.  In addition, I was sharing the lane with one of the girls on the team, and she's quite a bit slower on fly, so I had to dodge her at random points in the swim, and at the 150 we ran into each other (I was at the flags coming into the wall and she was a 50 behind me, coming off the wall, and pushed off into me), causing me to stop for about 5 seconds.  I felt ridiculously slow on the first 200 (and to be fair, I WAS ridiculously slow) and didn't have the energy to swim anywhere near race pace.  Still, I went a 2:49 on the first one.  With how slow I was swimming, how little energy I had, and the collision, I was very surprised by that time.  I would have thought I'd have been way more than 17 seconds off my race time.  If I'd had the lane to myself and had not been tired/burned out, I probably could have hit my meet time from a push.  Of course, I died even worse on the second one, but still went a 2:51, albeit without any collisions.  That speaks volumes for my vastly improved conditioning since early March.  I've always had quite a bit of difference between my fastest practice speed (even when racing in practice) and my meet speeds, so if that margin is pretty small in practice for my 200 fly, even with the extenuating circumstances, then that makes me pretty happy for this race in the future.  Of course, swimming the 200 fly long course is vastly different than swimming it short course, but if I can get my speed and endurance up during summer training, I should be just fine for swimming it at Nats.

200 back: I did 2 x 200 back in the second round of Tuesday's main set, and did another race pace 200 back on Wednesday morning at practice.  I swam this once in the short course season, as well, and that was at the beginning of February, when I went a 2:24.  On Tuesday, I was done.  The 200s fly had completely wiped me out, so I was basically floating on my back and fitfully waving my arms and legs about.  Anyways, I went a 2:40 on the first 200 and then a 2:38 on the second (how I managed to go faster on the second, I have no earthly clue).  I'm pretty confident that I'd have been able to take off about 2-3 seconds per 50 if I hadn't been so dang weak and tired.  Wednesday morning, my back and shoulders were definitely feeling the effects of the previous night's 200s, so I was hurting, and still felt ridiculously weak.  The 200 back at that practice was at the end of the main set, and I was a goner by then (no fly before it, thankfully!).  I pulled a 2:35, and that's with a complete shutdown at the 125.  Like the 200 fly, I'm pretty confident that I'll swim this event pretty well at Nats, since I've got the groundwork there to improve substantially on what I did in February.

Looking forward to seeing how my training for the 400 IM progresses, and really looking forward to training for the 200 fly and 200 back!

Summer training and beyond!

We officially enter the summer season after Memorial Day--the short course season ends on May 19th, then we've got a week or so break before the next session starts.

I'm taking the whole summer season as an opportunity to work on some different stuff in the pool and to really work on non-pool swimming stuff and non-pool stuff!  If all goes well with it, I'll incorporate the other stuff into my training regimen in the fall and really up the intensity of my workouts so that I can train for everything year round.

So, here's what I'm going to be training for, and when:

1. Over Memorial Day weekend, there's a 2 mile lake swim in the area that I'm going to do, the Jim McDonnell Lake Swim on May 27th.  There are a few folks from the team going to it, and they cheerfully twisted my arm into signing up as well.  I'm soooooo not a distance swimmer, so it should be quite a fun (that is, deliciously not-fun) event!
2. July 5th-8th is the USMS Summer National Championship meet in Omaha, NE, at the same pool the Olympic Trials will be held at a few days before.  Being in the summer, it's a long course meet--that means that the pool is 50m long, rather than the 25y of the short course pools.  Events become exponentially more challenging over the longer length of the pool.  On top of that, I'm intending to do more distance events at that meet than I've done in this season.  The events I want to do are the 100/200 fly, 100/200 back, and 200/400 IM.  That being said, the 400 IM and 100 fly are the first two events on the first day of the meet, and the 200 back is the 4th event that day.  There's no way I'm going to have the juice to pull that off, so I gotta figure out which events I *really* want to do.  I've got 3 weeks to decide, so I'm not making that call yet.  No matter which way I go, I will be doing substantially more difficult events at this meet than I've done yet.  My training goal in the pool in the two months between now and then is to train for all of those longer events so that I'll hopefully be able to do them in a 50m pool without drowning myself.
3. Triathlons!  Triathletes make up a HUGE proportion of the regulars on the swim team, and I've become friends with several of them.  In years past, I was pretty into riding my (really cruddy) mountain bike in Charleston, and would regularly go for 20-45 mile rides.  That being said, I haven't ridden my bike in a good year +, and have only ridden a spin bike in the meantime.  Same with running--used to run 5-6 days a week in Charleston, but have run a whopping total of two times in the year I've been up here, both times with teammates before Saturday morning practice.  With so many friends of mine who are into cycling, or running, or tris, I've been given a lot of recommendations to look into tris, as various folks have said they think I'd be pretty good at them if I train for them.  So, with that in mind, I'm going to go to the Culpeper Sprint Triathlon on August 5th.  It's a 750m lake swim, 16 mile ride, and 5k run.  I'm not worried about the run or the swim in the slightest.  The bike portion is the main area I need to work on.  My cruddy, 9 year old cheapo mountain bike isn't going to cut it, so I'm going to buy a road bike in June.  No clue which bike I'll get yet, as the world of road cycling is just a *teeny tiny* bit more complex then just going to the nearest Dick's Sporting Goods and picking a $150 mountain bike off the rack.  I've got two friends on the team who are helping me pick out a bike, and a couple friends in Charleston who are also providing advice and recommendations.
4. After the summer ends, I plan to keep training for tris and maybe some road races or running races.  They will serve as great cross training for swimming, which is my #1 priority.

I'm pumped!  Should be a great summer!