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!