Friday AM Swim...

This morning started a little earlier than usual. I had 4000 meters on my training schedule and wasn't sure how long it would take to cover that distance in the pool. Interestingly enough on Tuesday at masters practice, it was mentioned that the noon practice group swims 4000 meters in an hour. In a typical practice, there are short set breaks and occasionally waiting to hear what the next set is so it seemed hard to believe that 4000 could be knocked out in an hour in that setting. We came to the conclusion that they swam longer than an hour. Mostly that was because the competitive people in the group did not want to believe they could be faster than us. I see a duel in the pool coming soon...

Anyhow, I got up about 30 minutes early so I could be at the pool by 5:30. I don't know about you but on Fridays I am draggggggggggging. I hit the snooze button a couple of times before I finally rolled out of bed. By the time I got into the pool it was 5:45. Not too bad but made me wonder if I would be able to get my full workout in before 7:00 in order to get dressed and get to work.

Since I do masters during the week, I think I am going to use Fridays for working on distance. When race day comes I want to have that confidence tucked away in my brain that I know I can cover the distance. The workout looked like this:

1 x 2000 swim
1 x 500 kick
1 x 1000 pull
1 x 400 kick
1 x 100 cool down

I was suprised that I got it done in 1:15 including a few set breaks and an unplanned stop to pull a freakishly long hair out of my face (is there anything more gross than swimming through someone else's hair in the pool - well, I guess a bandaid might be grosser). Racewise, I know I can swim a 100 in about 1:30 and a 1500 in 26:30 but wasn't sure how long I could hold that pace. It kind of feels good to have a closer estimate for the IM distance.

As I was swimming my cool down, I noticed the man in the lane next to me was using a kick board as a pool buoy. Very odd. I can't imagine that was very comfortable. I assume he wasn't doing flip turns with that thing although I should have watched for them, that would have been talent!