Thursday swim and modest TOB

Finally made it to Swimtech midday swim class at Chelsea Piers - I thought it was great!

It's really just a masters swim workout, not as much drill stuff as I was hoping for (but maybe sometimes they do more drill work?). Three lanes, I think the middle one is probably swimming on 1:55 or 2:00 and that I could perfectly well join it, but I liked the slow lane, too - three other swimmers of much my ability level, going on rest intervals rather than set send-offs which makes it easier to sub in other strokes.

(One woman was doing all breaststroke, another guy quite a bit of back - the sets as given are freestyle only, but there is lots of room for substitutions.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed it - my three lanemates were exceptionally friendly, as was the coach, who used to coach for TNYA and currently completes as an elite triathlete - a good resource, I am thinking!

Let us now see if I can remember what we did - no hope of remembering the rest intervals, but they varied between 10 and 30 seconds.

100 warmup (before class started)

4 x 150 as swim, pull, kick, swim

3 x 50 as easy, medium, hard

8 x 100: odds pull, evens swim (I did #6 and #8 as IM)

100 easy

4 x 50 kick-swim

100 easy

8 x 50: #1-3 5 breaths only, #4-6 4 breaths only, #7-8 3 breaths only (i.e. once on way down, once at wall, once on way back - I just about managed this, but not quite, I surfaced about 3 yards early at the end!)

2450 yards total

I wanted to go for a real bike ride in Central Park afterwards - it is my notion that I can do a swim-bike brick on Tuesdays and Thursdays - but I was stymied. I rode out of Riverside Park onto 95th St. thinking "Oh, yes, I can ride directly over to the park this way, that is sensible!" Half a block later, as I came up to the intersection, I realized that it was a terrible idea - all the traffic coming off the West Side Highway goes onto 95th St. I missed 2 lights due to mild anxiety (it is an uphill as well as traffic, which makes it more stressful - like driving stick!), crossed Broadway on foot due to impending panic, then realized that at Columbus the street dead-ends and it's one way in the opposite direction. Took a right onto the sidewalk (Columbus is northbound only at that point and also full of trucks and traffic),* wherepon an old lady rightly scolded me for riding on the sidewalk - at that point I felt ready to burst into tears, anxiety was only moderate but I figured that really I should just call it a day and try again tomorrow.

There are times when it really is the right thing to push through fears, but the cognitive behavioral guy has persuaded me that the way to get over serious anxiety is to take things in baby steps and to back off if things are daunting - so I will start fresh tomorrow, and make it my priority to find 'my route' from Riverside to Central Park so that I can make it a routine for Tuesdays and Thursdays in coming weeks.

2450 yards swim
10 miles bike

[* Or maybe it was Amsterdam? I honestly couldn't say!]