Monday-night swimming

A good workout this evening, with lots of very valuable technique stuff, only I am feeling a bit mournful because I forgot how to swim that butterfly again!

I pretty much knew it would happen--there was simply no way I could get in to do some quiet practice time, pool hours and real-life obligations made it impossible--and when I tried a couple lengths at the end of the session this evening I was back on that old wrong timing, and with no time to try and work it out, they were shutting up shop....

Hmmm, it is rapidly becoming my fantasy to live in a building with a swimming pool (like my hero Wayne Koestenbaum, who swims every morning and does some number of pushups I can't remember--the same number as his age?), then I could go and practice technique on a whim in the middle of the night when I can't sleep...

OK, the workout details are now a blur, but let us see if I can somewhat reconstruct 'em.

(I decadently took a taxi home again, it is $10 as opposed to $2 for the subway but it often seems well worth it, it's literally only 6-7 minutes to 116th and Amsterdam and then a few minutes' walk home, whereas the subway is 35, and I don't get home till 10:15, and it's no good. I already resolved a few weeks ago that if I am going to take the subway home, I have to bring something to eat while I wait, otherwise it's over an hour after the end of the workout--too long, too late! The time is worth $8 to me!)

Warmup: 300 swim, 200 pull, 200 kick with fins

(Hmmm, I am not at all sure this account is going to be correct--maybe I'm leaving something out? But it is good for the swimming brain to make the effort to reconstruct, otherwise I will never learn this stuff...)

First set: 12 technique-type 50s of various types, in each case drill on the way down and swim on the way back. The usual stuff: kick on sides, opposite-side breathe integrated into side kicking, long doggie paddle for good catch, sculling (evil sculling! however this evening it really was giving me a good feel for the water).

Second set: 8 x 75 with pull buoy on 1:40, breathing every x number of strokes as follows (the number count is for each 25 of the 75)

1 and 2: 3 3 3
3 and 4: 5 5 5
5 and 6: 3 5 7
7 and 8: 7 5 3

(NB good for me to practice bilateral breathing with a pull buoy, I must make time for this on my own also, that is the way I am going to get comfortable with breathing on the wretched left side. But it actually was quite good this evening.)

Third set: 4 x 150, first 100 pull and then 50 swim, concentrating on keeping legs virtually immobile and having a long slow powerful pull (10 seconds rest)

And finally (it should have been sprint 25s but only one out of the four pace clocks was working so we had to be starting always at one end) a rather nice little set to finish (I did not work hard enough this evening, it was funny! I do not know what's up, I think I've just been swimming more than most of the other people there do during the rest of the week & my conditioning is improving disproportionately):

8 x 50 on 1:10 - on each 25, take 10 sprint-type strokes then swim easy the rest of the length. Strangely relaxing, slo-mo in a delightful way! The end of this Monday-night workout is always where everyone else is knackered and I want to do a lot more work still! It was plenty of rest, too; but 1:05 would have been perhaps a bit too fast for the purpose of the drill, so there you go...

And I was proud of myself because I assessed the situation early and made a proactive move that kind of saved the workout. There are five lanes, I've been in lane 4 these many months now with two rather ideal lanemates. I am slightly the fastest, certainly the most enthusiastic, and we swim very well together. But they are both doing the marathon this weekend and haven't been in evidence for some weeks--meanwhile there is a fellow who is rather trying to swim with (and slower than he thinks--also he is the fellow who wears fins on a non-fin set and keeps on bumping into toes without understanding why he might be doing something annoying!) who came in with us a few weeks ago and caused a great deal of stress and inconvenience! And today it was just me and him in lane 4, and I steeled myself and popped under into lane 3. We were sparsely populated, so a few others shifted around a bit and I was just sharing that lane with one other woman who seemed in fact to swim pretty much exactly the same speed as I do, maybe a bit slower since I felt we were not doing any very challenging sets today, really I can swim a lot faster than that! So this is good. I will stay in that lane, I think, until my two good lanemates are back, but they will not be next week since it is the day after the marathon.

(And I think we may have sorted out the CU morning lane issues too, by a similar move--but this may be a bit rocky still for a few weeks, I must wait and see...)

Too bad I actually have, you know, an interesting and demanding job that I rather love, really all I want to do right now is learn how to swim properly! I think there is a possible Wednesday-evening window where I might go and practice a bit of stuff--the morning workout is good for building fitness and comfort level on breast and back because they are already more or less functional, but the fly bits are always sort of over before I have even minimally got the hang of it, and really the thing is also easier for now with fins! All right, I will make a point of it, either Wednesday early AM or more plausibly evening at Teacher's College, it must happen so that I am in good train for my lesson on Saturday...