Thursday, July 28, 2011

Fastest Swim Ever

Dee-

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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