Road to Arizona 2017 – Monday Recap 3

Another good week in my swim and strength block!

12/5/16 – Short Swim

This time it was warm up and drills, then a series of short sprints with short rests, then a cool down.  The thing that made this swim memorable was that somebody jumped in to share my lane and I didn’t see him until we collided.  I usually swim late and night and I’m just not used to sharing a lane with anyone or even thinking that someone might have jumped into my lane while I was mid-lap.  I apologized and he was super friendly and I pulled it together and we shared the lane just fine for the rest of the swim.  Lane Sharing – Achievement unlocked.

12/6/16 – Strength Workout

I am glad that we are doing this strength and swim block of training.  I’m getting stronger and I feel like it’s really going to help when I get back to the bike and run.

12/7/16 – Speedwork Swim

I am so happy with this swim.  I blew my goal times out of the water (see what I did there!) I’m swimming faster than I did last year, and I’m really enjoying these swims with lots of sprints.

12/8/16 – Strength Work

Another day, another eleventy gabillion squats.

12/9/16 – Day off

12/10/16 – Long Swim

1 second per 100 meters faster than last week, I’ll take any gain I can get! Seriously though, this swim went great, it was faster than the goal time we set for last year and it was pretty easy.  This is listed as a “steady, easy swim” but I think next week I’ll still push a bit harder.

Another first  – there was a dude in the lane beside me who I became aware was taking long rests and then starting his lap at the same time as me.  Maybe it was a coincidence (that happened during the entire 3o-ish minutes that he was in the water with me) or maybe the reason he was having to take the long rests was that I was swimming faster than him so he had to wait for me to finish another  lap in order to start at the same time.

To be super clear, I don’t know anything about this person – their goals, their swim experience or anything else, and me being faster than someone obviously isn’t a value judgement.  What it is, is a pretty new experience. I’ve heard that it gives people a burst of motivation to pass someone, so I typically consider myself to be doing basically everyone the great service of helping them improve their morale by giving them someone to pass.  I can’t say that it made me feel good or better to pass someone, but it was an interesting experience.

12/11/16 – Missed Workout – Bike

Today was supposed to be a bike ride for fun, but family stuff lasted longer than expected, time got away from me, and I didn’t get it in.  I notice that I have a really hard time with workouts where the notes say “just have fun” or “just [run/bike/swim] for this amount of time don’t worry about speed or anything” and where there is no goal for time or heart-rate or anything. This isn’t a criticism of my coach –  it’s a perfectly reasonable workout. It’s a criticism of me – I haven’t had a lot of workouts like this, but I took some time to look back at workouts that I’ve missed and I noticed that a pretty high percentage had in common that there was no goal other than to complete the workout and, often, to “have fun!” It seems like it’s a subconscious mental thing (maybe since there’s no way I’m going to have fun I somehow feel like there is no way to achieve the stated goal?) so maybe I feel like I can blow off these workouts?  Regardless of what’s going on, I obviously need to fix this, and so I’m re-committing to consciously make sure I’m not blowing off these workouts.

Here are this week’s Selfies:

New swimsuit from Swimsuitsforall.com It’s not unicolor and ugly – very exciting!

Strength in the great outdoors

Swim in my plain dark blue suit that makes me miss my new suit!

Strength!

Back in my new (now semi-new?) suit!