In case you've missed it, I'm not the best swimmer. I started swimming last May while we were honeymooning in Jamaica. It was hot and they had a sweet lap pool and frankly that seemed like a better plan than running in the heat, so I gave it a go. I was awful. When we got home, I went back to just running until July when I decided to try adding swimming to my training. My first goal was to swim 1600m in an hour (3:45/100m pace). It took awhile. Here is a note from one of my first swims: "Kept my face in the water the whole time, which was hard because I'm pretty sure I'm going to drown at any moment but amazingly I managed to survive." I've come a long way since then.
Last night I hit up the MAC after work for my weekly "long" swim. With Augusta rapidly approaching, I decided each week I needed to do one swim of 2000m or more. Last week was my first "long" swim and Chad had me time myself so I could see my progress. I decided to time myself again and hoped for a good swim.
I hit the first 500m so fast, I thought I miscounted. I timed the next lap and realized that I had not miscounted, I was just swimming faster than I thought. I slowed it down a bit on the second 500 fearing that I would die sometime towards the end if I kept up that pace (more irrational fear of dying in the pool). Instead my pace stayed pretty much the same for the whole swim. I wasn't taking it easy, but I also wasn't killing myself or taking breaks.
The end result was a 44:20 2000m swim, with splits of 10:55, 11:10, 11:08, 11:07. That's 2:13/100m pace. I had gotten myself into the 2:20-2:30 range consistently, but hadn't managed to take the next step. Until yesterday. Obviously, I still have a long way to go. Most people consider 2:13 pace quite slow, but for me, it's a breakthrough. Note that I'm still much slower than the "World's Worst Olympic Swimmer" in the video.
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