Discipline in Focus - The Return of the Swim

What's this? Two blog entries in ONE day? Well, I'm making a conscious effort to be more diligent about certain things and this is one of them. My Calendar says today is the day for a Discipline in Focus post and this is the time for me to do it, so here it is.
My swim has been struggling a lot lately, but I'm optimistice that my struggles are resulting in me becoming a better, more balanced swimmer. How? Here's how.
For quite a while I was experiencing soreness and tiredness in my left shoulder that was disprportionate to my right. It's one thing to be beat from a swim, quite another to be struggling, and very frustrated, because one arm is overtired. I got to dread my swims. After some discussions with Mark that mostly involved him knocking a little common sense into me...

Mark: You're icing your shoulder when it's sore, right?
Me: Uhm....

My swimming got cut WAY back and I started from scratch with learning to breathe on my right while swimming. I always breathed on my left before. We're still bringing my yardage back up to where it was before, but now it's with me breathing on both sides (though not bilaterally yet) and with the apparently tricky advice that if my shoulder bothers me, I'll ice it. It's a good thing Captain Obvious has a coach or he might forget to bring his bike to the race one of these days.
I'm not nearly as coordinated breathing on my right as on my left, but it's improving a lot and my shoulder feels fine.

Oops

So I get to the Rec this morning and change and head out to the pool... and something just feels off. Like I'm forgetting something. I chalk it up to the fact that I'm not usually in the water at just after 8am and still not entirely awake.
I hope in the pool, hit the start button on my watch, push off from the side of the pool aaaaand... promptly headed back to the side of the pool.
I forgot my goggles.
I climb out of the pool, dash into the locker room, open my bag and... no goggles.
I left them at home.
Doh!
So I shower (I hate smelling like chlorine), dry off, change, head home, find my goggles (and my swim paddles) trek back up to the Rec, change (again) and finally get my swim in.
Now, if I had done this in the evening like I have been for most of this year, I'd have been up a creek. But because it was pre-8am when I first got to the Rec, I was still able to get my workout done by 11.

Lesson Learned!

Catching up

I've been away from here for entirely too long.
My training has been going so-so. I've had some really, really good days and some less than good days.
Last Sunday through Tuesday (3/30-4/1) were some GREAT training days. Sunday I started ignoring my watch when out on my run. Well, not entirely, basically I just set it so that I couldn't see what my pace was, instead just watching the total time and trying to monitor my current effort. I ended up doing 10.2 miles in 90 minutes, an 8:48 pace! And I felt really good.
Monday was more of the same, this time on the bike. My 90 minute bike ride resulted in an average 138 watts. When i did my swim, the pool was set to 50m instead of 25 yards... what a difference THAT makes! I think i mentioned this once before, but holy cow...
Then Tuesday I rocked the bike AND the run on my interval sets.

On the not so great side, I missed my speed workouts the last two weeks... I just got so caught up in my work that I completely missed them. My swim on Sunday was short too because, again, I got caught up working and forgot how late it was so I was only able to get in part of the workout.
On the plus side, these are time management problems, not problems due to injury, over-training or anything like that so I should be (and I am!) thankful for that. Eventually I'm going to get my internal clock straight and get my sorry butt out of bed early enough to work out BEFORE I go to studio, that way I can't get caught up in work and lose track of time.

The Post of Shame...

I hate missing workouts. If I miss one, I get grumpy, a couple and I'm miserable... miss a whole week and all I've got is shame.
Ok, so maybe I shouldn't feel that bad about it. my thesis was due on Friday and I literally didn't leave the school except to go home and sleep (one night not even that happened). I'm sure Matt over at Athletic Wannabee knows what that's like. Surviving off of homemade trail mix and whatever food I could get delivered and spending a ridiculous number of hours writing. I missed the whole week. As excited as I was to get going on training with the new benchmarks, the time just wasn't there.
however, i'm back in the saddle now. I got a decent ride in Saturday while watching the Original version of Empire Strikes Back, then got ina nice long run outdoors on Sunday. I'd have gone for a swim too but the rec was closed for Easter. I had forgotten it was Easter... this time last year I was in Boulder.
Oh, and I turned 29 on Friday.

Today i had a great swim. Well, not great, but certainly quite enjoyable. The pool was set to the 50m orientation for a change so i got to do my workout in a 50m pool for the first time. it was also a 3400m swim, my longest single workout yet, just over 2 miles. I thought about shooting for 2.4 miles... but decided against it, I'll get there soon enough.

Swim TT... Take 2

let's cut right to the chase shall we?
2000 FOR TIME (4x500 with :05… get your splits)
Splits (not counting the :05 breaks)
1. 9'22"
2. 9'41"
3. 9'46"
4. 9'42"
T. 38'31"
For a total time of 38'48" counting the :05 breaks

This felt so much better. Not just the time, but as soon as I started warming up I really felt like I was much looser, more relaxed and freer in the water. I started out too fast (which is pretty obvious) but my other times were pretty close to what I was hoping for, so I'm not sweating it too much. It wasn't a personal best, but it was close and I'm pretty pleased.

Aauuuuuuugh!

I was really excited about my swim test... and it did not go well at all.
I got to the rec this evening and realized that I didn't have either pairs of my shorts. I had running pants and two shirt (one short sleeve one long) and no shorts. I usually have two pairs of shorts i can swim in and i quickly realized I had left both at home in the dryer. Ugh.
Not only that, but because I had put off the swim until the end of the evening when I knew I'd be able to get the lane I wanted, I didn't have time to run home and get those shorts and get back in time to do the workout. In fact, I'd have gotten back in time to see them close the pool. Bad decision on my part. My next thought was my underwear, could I wear that? I have a couple pairs that could pass for speedo type swim wear. Unfortunately, this was not one of those days. I then remembered I had one pair of running shorts in studio. A twelve minute trip later I was changing into some very baggy shorts. I normally wear clingy bicycle type shorts on my swims, I was a little skeptical about these shorts, I kept them in studio for spur of the moment runs, not swims. Still they were all I had.
I did a quick warm-up and I knew right away this was going to be tough. I felt like I was swimming through thick seaweed. Still, I told myself to relax, the shorts aren't going to affect my time very much, they're just shorts after all. I centered myself a bit, floating on my back in the water, then started the TT.
I started out way too strong and realized it after a couple laps, partly a result of my earlier frustration and partly, I think, a reaction against starting the bike TT too slow. I told myself to relax, calm down and focus on maintaining a steady pace... no point exhausting myself on the first 500. I was halfway through the first 500 at that point and looked at my watch... 4'59"! Not what I had been expecting at all. based on how hard I had been swimming I would have expected a much, much faster time at that point. 4'59" was, honestly, devastating.
I finished the 500 in 10'02", collected myself a bit in the 5 second break, then headed into my next 500, trying to salvage the TT. I tried focusing on my form, making it as clean and perfect as I could, making my strong long and trying to maximize every movement without pushing too hard, knowing I had another two 500s after this one. I finished in 10'08".
I started the third 500 and immediately my mind shifted to whether I was making the right decision. This was possibly the worst I had felt during a swim in a long time. I felt like each stroke was getting me nowhere and it was driving me bonkers, alternately angry, frustrated and miserable.
Within the first 100 yards of the third set, I made a decision. I stopped. I wasn't getting anything out of this workout except anger and I doubt it would tell Mark much about my progress. So I decided to stop and get up early tomorrow to do the workout properly. I don't know how much the shorts actually slowed me down, but I can be pretty sure that my anger and frustration was certainly ruining the workout. I usually find swimming to be very peaceful and relaxing, even when I swim hard, but this was just horrible and angry.
So tomorrow I'm going to get up early and tackle the swim. in fact, i think i'm going to head home now and make sure I get enough sleep before I do it. Less than twelve hours from now I will have a new post about how I rocked the swim and how glad I am that I didn't try to power through a bad workout. I can and I will.

Snow, USAT and UBUNTU

I'm supposed to get in a 2500 yard today but the blizzard that struck Cincinnati has shut down my gym... Booooooo! I'm going to do the ride I'm supposed to do tomorrow, this evening instead. if the Rec doesn't open tomorrow (the storm is supposed to last until 4 or 5 tomorrow and these Cincinnatians are sissies) then I'll do my Sunday run either outdoors or in one of the academic buildings. Yeah, it's feasible, just not highly desirable.
The perk to this should be that the Rec was closed because school closed.... except we're grad students so my thesis adviser came in and held class from 1-5 anyways. His dedication is admirable but it would have been nice to have the whole day off to work on my document.

I got my USAT membership yesterday in the mail. I'm entered in enough races this year that joining made sense if only to save money on the insurance fees. Plus, now I have a new sticker to slap on my laptop... some people put bumper stickers on their cars, I put them on my laptop (since I don't own a car).

I also recently put Ubuntu on my old laptop. Ubuntu is a Linux release for the less than tech savvy. Most people hear Linux and they freak out because it's not Windows or Mac... but it was really easy to install and, honestly, is probably easier to use than Mac or Windows. Oh... and it's free. Completely free. So are almost all the programs used on Linux (and yeah, there are a lot). The only thing that was even a little bit of trouble was that it doesn't play DVDs. Technically the software to run the DVD players to watch movies is proprietary and, thus, legally questionable to reproduce in the U.S but there are some very easy tutorials online for doing this (if it's legal where you are of course).

Gotta poke a little fun at Coach Mark who emailed me to ask if I use Instant Messenger... Mark... Mark, Mark, Mark... I'm a GenXer, graduate student, and blogger who also has Facebook and LinkedIn accounts (both of which I'm buddied with him on). C'mon, the question shouldn't have been whether I use an IM client, but which ones! Silly Mark!

30 days of swimming, a look back

Yesterday was my first swim in which I reached 3000 yards in a single workout. It's funny, there isn't really much difference between 2800 yards and 3000... it only took an extra 4 minutes or so, but just getting to that nice round number feels so damn good.
Less than six months ago I started doing my 30 days of swimming. At that point, 1000 yards freestyle was a challenge. My first workout was 800 yards and I bumped it up to 1100 the next day. My swim yesterday was as long as my combined swim for the first day of my 30 days of swimming.
It's amazing the progress I've made in that time and the 30 days of swimming was a big part of that. Mike Ricci of D3 Multisport was the one who gave me that all-important first swimming lesson and suggested the 30 days of swimming. Now Mark is building on that, pushing me faster, harder, longer.
3000 yards... I've come a long way to swim that far...

Week in Review

Well, last week was a pretty good week all around. I got my 2500yd swim under 50' 00" which was a goal from the prior week.

My long ride on Saturday was agonizing... not from a physical standpoint, far from it. Mentally, however, it's not easy to maintain focus, or even interest, when riding indoors for three hours. The last half hour was a conscious battle, tracking every step of the workout set, telling myself over and over again that it was almost done. That aspect, more than anything else, is where the most training is coming in on those days. I watched the end of Transformers, all of the first X-Men movie and about half of X-Men 2 over the course of the ride.

Sunday my long run started off slow and a little tough. The battery died in my footpod so I was out of luck with that and had to resort to other means to track my pace. It didn't help that the hardest part of my Sunday long runs is always the first 10-20 minutes (again, a mental thing) and I had trouble finding my groove but about halfway through my second mile I found it and felt great for the rest of the run.

Tuesday Intervals and a Long Swim

I've been meaning to get this down... Mark has wanted to know how the Tuesday workouts feel and I said I'd write something up that's a little more detailed on them. I jotted down some notes so here they are.

The Run - I did this workout first. The switch to 5:00 on and 1:00 off was kind of a big one. I had a little bit of a stitch in my side toward the end of the second repetition but it faded during the recovery minute and didn't return. I nailed the paces pretty good for each interval though, .61 miles for every 5 minutes which breaks down to an 8:11 interval. My goal pace was 8:10. I felt like I had a couple more repetitions in me but I was stopped by 1. The Schedule and 2. The bike ride I had later.

The Bike - This was fun. Sort of. Actually it really was. The bulk of the workout was 10x 3'00" at 130 followed by 3'00" at 185. No trouble really during the workout but I was certainly glad it was over! This was a bump up from the 10x 3'00 at 160 followed by 3'00" at 185 Mark had me doing before. That said though, the switch from the god-awful stationary bikes to my bike on a trainer with a power meter with an actual fan in front of me instead of a tiny little vent on the top of the stationary bike felt like a much better workout. I was finishing those workouts on the stationary bike dripping an unhealthy amount of sweat. I'm pretty sure their power readings were off as well.

The next day - I was definitely glad I didn't have to do either of those workouts again the next day, I had a little bit of heaviness in the legs, more of a tiredness than a soreness but I was looking forward to the run and didn't have any trouble with it.

Friday...
I got to the Rec for my swim, checked my workout and realized.. Whoa! 1500Yard steady swim? Really? 2500? I've never done a straight swim that long before, freestyle OR breast stroke. That's 1.4 miles... straight. Well, knowing me, I was up for the challenge! I got the first 2000 yards in feeling pretty solid in 40 minutes flat but I really felt my form slip in the last 500 yards and slowed down a lot (or at least it felt like a lot) finishing in 50:15. Still, I'm pretty pleased with that result and I look forward to pushing my time under 50 even.