Banana Swim

Tonight's swim was pretty freaking bananas.  After such a hard core weekend of the long stuff I was kind of hoping for some long slow distance just to take it easy.  But the RAM coach had other ideas.

We started with a 900 meter warmup.  Easy stuff, some swim, some kick and some drill.

The main set was a broken mile time trial.  I really love the way this coach Steve breaks up a mile.  We're in the 50 m pool for the summer, so each set was followed by a 10 second break.
350 (7 lengths)
300 (6)
250 (5)
200 (4)
100 (2)
100 (2)
50 (1)


That adds up to a 1500 m set.  Subtract 1:10 off of your total time to discount for the rest in there and you get the mile TT time.  We're going to do it again in 2 weeks, and he wants to see how much time he can shave off of the broken mile time between now and then.

I PR'd!!!  I did the mile TT in 26:54.  Last year my mile time was typically around 28 minutes.  Seriously cool.  For perspective, there were 10 other people that were at least 2 minutes faster than me, and 1 other person slower.  I didn't care.  By mortal standards, a sub-30 minute mile is pretty freaking fast.  It just happens that the other people on my team are seriously fast.  Fast enough to make everyday fast people like me look slow.  But I was seriously amped about that PR.  Had me riding high for the rest of the set.

So what did Steve have in mind for the rest of the night?  How do you follow a mile TT?  With a broken IM and kick set of course.  150 kick choice, 150 fly/back/breast, 150 free kick choice, 150 back/breast/free.  Then another easy 100 free for a cool down.  The coolest part about that was that I actually swam the entire 50 m of butterfly.  I'm usually good for a 25 fly, and by about 30 m I start choking, or breathing in water, or can't get my head up high enough to breathe easily and switch back to the 1 arm fly drill so I can still breathe to the side.

But this time I actually made the entire 50.  At 25 I felt relaxed.  A few more strokes and I thought I might get there.  About 40 m in it got really tough, but I held form.  Then I hit the wall (1 lap into a 3 lap set) and about collapsed in joy.  I had nothing left in my arms when I finally started the backstroke, so I relaxed into it and then pushed the breast a bit (twss).

So the total swim was 3600.  Killer swim practice, I'm going to sleep good tonight.  I absolutely revel in joy over this masters team, and this is why.