Monday-night swimming

And it was good, too--I have really been missing that swimming fix...

It was a very straightforward workout--so straightforward that I have rather forgotten the details!

(Hmmm, shortsightedness, can't really see what's written on the board without glasses--and then somehow I find it much harder to remember afterwards if I didn't mentally process in a coherent and conceptual way.)

Let's say 250 warmup, 6 x 100 straight free (25 easy, 75 strong), 4 x 100 drill (25 head up, 25 catch-up, 25 kick six times and then stroke, 25 swim), 4 x 100 first 25 underwater (which I can only do about HALF of--but I followed Wendy's advice about properly facing the bottom of the pool and certainly found myself with less of a tendency to veer upwards, at least until the point where I suddenly popped up through water that felt as thick as pudding) then 75 swim.

I was stymied at the beginning by something I completely didn't think of--I am in the Cayman Islands, they drive on the other side of the road, they do circle swim in the other direction too! This is all very well and good, but it renders useless my by-now-adequately-fast open turn with right hand touching--I was still fumbling at the end of practice to do it the other way round with left hand touching, I must ponder that one...

Given the turn issue and the relative lack of swimming in the last couple weeks, I found myself a bit awkwardly between groups: a little too fast for the fastest beginners' lane, but not really fast enough for the slower intermediate. After the first two hundreds, I switched up and did the next four with the faster ones and then also the first two drills sets--but I was working absurdly hard, it was time to switch back. If this were my regular swim workout, I would doggedly work to get fast enough to be the back person in that lane, it's a stretch but perhaps doable--maybe on Thursday I will do some of the initial stuff with them again before switching back to the slower one...

(Because the thing is that everyone is incredibly nice, about a hundred times nicer than at either of the swim workouts I go to in NY! At each of those there are one or two reasonably friendly people, and after many months you get people becoming more civil, but NY swimming is singularly unwelcoming, I cannot say I quite recommend it!)

(Here's the swim club site, and here's the coach's wikipedia bio--interesting. Mmmmm--french fries... Thanks to Brent for inviting me!)

Slightly intractable sleeplessness situation, it is true it was rather early when I first tried but I was so knackered it seemed advisable--not! But I am going to make a second stab at it shortly, once I read some more pages of a trashy novel...