This kinda sucks, because it is one week before Zones, but I am already training on my own once or twice a week. The question is, can I train hard on my own all the time, or do I need the team practices to keep my consistency.

I have the following options. The CAC pool has a team that trains there 3 times a week, and if we joined there, it would eliminate the need for our Lifetime Fitness membership. Lifetime has a team, but the setup Lifetime has for the team is so pathetic it isn’t even a consideration. The final team option, and by far the best option as far as teams go, is to join DAM and swim at their Southlake practices.

DAM has a very large team, and the Southlake practices typically have 8 lanes with about 3 people a lane. That is 24 people regularly showing up to practice compared to LACs 5 people. The downside to swimming at Southlake? It is more than 30 minutes away, and the practice is at 5:15. I already am used to getting up at 4:30, but what I am not used to is having to get ready in a gym locker room for work and not being able to cook a hot breakfast for myself. Spoiled am I.

The alternative, and likely choice at least initially, is to workout at Lifetime from 4:30 until 5:45 every morning. No one is using the pool at that hour, so lane space is not a problem, and I can get out and get back to the house to shower for work and eat a hot breakfast and still make it to work by 7am.

Brook and I would really like to swim with a team, and Brook is strongly considering CAC. I have kind of already discarded it because I don’t think the intensity will be there, but this is an area where more research would easily change my mind.

As for Southlake. Next Saturday I am planning on swimming with DAM in Southlake (next Friday is my last LAC practice), and that will determine if I think it is feasible. If it is, I will probably check out a Sunday practice at SMU, just for fun, and then finish out the month practicing in Southlake in the mornings and getting ready there to gage if I think I can tolerate doing that on a regular basis. Practice is over at 6:30, and Southlake pool is only about 10 minutes from work, so I would not be adding to my commute.

Now if I could afford a nice house close to the Southlake pool, it would be a done deal. Brook would become a full time trophy wife, and living in Southlake would decrease her commute to the salon and spa, and I could train 5x/week and still enjoy a hot breakfast and a nice shower before work.

Since afford and Southlake don’t go well together at this current time, Brook will continue to be a full time veterinarian and a part time trophy wife and the most likely scenerio will be that I train at Lifetime for a while.

Lotto Texas is at $28 million, maybe I will invest a dollar.

Here are the full meet results: http://www.damswim.com/meet_results/2009_dam_scy_spring_meet.pdf

Here are my results:
100fr: 55.86
splits: 27.42, 28.44

50fr: 25.30

200fr: 2:04.54
100 splits: 1:00.04, 1:04.50
50 splits: 28.61, 31.43, 32.41, 32.09

The meet went 500, 100, 50, 200, with the 500 being the 3rd event and the 200 being second to last. There was less than an hour between events, which was fine, but the heat was not turned on until an hour after the meet started, so it was very cold on deck. Pool temp was fine.

I ate my goggles on the start of the 500, so I stopped, put them on, and swam a pretty easy 6:20, with 200 being back. Swam just fast enough so I didn’t get last

I am happy with my 100 time and my 50 time, but I think my 200 should have been 1:57ish. I think I have the speed, just not the endurance. My last season US times were 25.x, 55.x and 1:55.x consistently in season SCY.

Outdoor pool was not open, but I did head to Lifetime and do 900 cool down after the meet. Felt pretty good until I couldn’t breath through my nose anymore later that night.

Around 10am, when I finally decided it was time to take a shower, I turned on the water and said, “I feel fine now, maybe I will swim later.” Realized how stupid that was, turned the water off and headed directly to the gym.

I am focusing on going fast on the weekend, and not really worrying about yardage. Saturday, I hopped in and did a 200m warm up (very short warm up for me) and then immediately did a 200m free for time. This will be very similar to a meet, where I will have a shorter than usual warm up and than an all out sprint. I actually swam faster from a push (not off the blocks), than I did in the November meet. The bad news is, I am still 20+ seconds off my goal time and 10 seconds off what I need to be able to go from a push to realistically hit my goal time (1:49.99 yards).

Today, instead of doing a fast 200, I did 8×50 all out on a minute. My goal currently on this set is to swim 50s on a 30 and this morning is was swimming 32-33. Not where I need to be yet.

I am happy that I finally got to swim 5 days out of 7, and hopefully I can maintain that. I am moving in the right direction toward my goal, and it will be obvious in a couple weeks if I am progressing fast enough to achieve it by the end of March.

I might go to a meet at the end of the month by myself so I can get a real race in before Zones. Entries are due on the 25th, so I will probably wait until the last minute to enter. Don’t really like the pool hosting the meet

This was my yoga-swim workout at Lifetime.

• 600m free warm up
• 4×100m back on 2:00 working on long stroke with solid kick
• 10×50m flutter kick on 1:30 odds down on left side back on right side, evens on back
• 2×50m dolphin kick on 1:30
• 4×100m back on 2:00 same as above
• 12×50m IM on 1:00 1st 50 fly drill, 2nd 50 back, 3rd 50 breast, 4 times through
• 8×50m free on 1:00 odds catchup drill, focus on early vertical forearm, both with strong kick
• 1×200m for time 2:35
• 300m cool down 200 back, 100 free

A 2:35 in meters converts to a 2:18 high in yards. I would like to get the 2:35 down to a 2:10 from a push. For comparison, my 200m free from the November meet was a 2:26.44, but a 2:10 is where I need to be to break 1:50 in yards, if not a little faster.

Back to normal practice and weights tomorrow. Hopefully I did not lose too much aerobic ground this week.

Dehydration sucks. Pretty much I was a goddamned retard yesterday, and paid for it today. Usually at work I drink about 10oz of water every hour, and more if practice was hard. Yesterday, I must have worked out harder than I thought, but I probably only drank 3 16 oz glasses of water and a bunch of wine.

There is a big difference between the 48 oz of water I drank, and the 90+ oz I should have drank. Obviously hydrating with wine is not helpful, but I think the key problem is that I don’t have the habits in place around the house that I need.

Even now, writing this post, I am sitting here thirsty. Thirst is a delayed response, so I needed to be drinking water hours ago.

Because of the dehydration this morning, I skipped my Sunday practice. I will have to do a better job in the future of maintaining my hydration.

I am off to down a glass of water right now.

This morning we left at normal time, 4:40am, to head out for a swim at Lifetime. Lifetime is a 24×7 gym, but they don’t have anyone working the front desk in the middle of the night, so you have to ring the door bell. One of the staff who is prepping the building for normal hours comes out and opens the door. This took about 3 minutes, which was fine because we were all bundled up against the cold and the front vestibule was protecting us from the worst of the cold anyway, but I wasn’t sure whoever it was that was supposed to unlock the door actually heard the bell. It was my first time this early, so I waited patiently.

I need not have worried about the bell. About 30 minutes later, while swimming I hear the front bell ring. It is not so much that it is really loud, but it must chime from every speaker in the entire building.

Swimming that early on the weekend was cool it was not until I was getting out at 6:10 that someone else was finally getting in. I like having the pool to myself but I am sure during the week it picks up earlier.

I got in 3800 meters, or a little less than 2.5 miles.

This morning I did 400 free, 300 back, 200 free, 100 back as a warmup. Originally I thought I would 200s, starting at 3:00 and dropping 5 seconds until I couldn’t make one. But I wanted to do at least 5 200s, so I did 5×200 on 3:00. This ended up being more aerobic than I wanted, but oh well. Following that with 5×100 back on 1:50 to loosen up for my sprint set. The sprint set was 10×50s on a 1:00 holding 35, which ended up being too easy. It got me breathing hard, but I should have tried holding 32s. The rest of the workout was supposed to be aerobic pace, and was 12×25 kick on side, down right, back left and a 300 cool down.

The goals for Saturdays are to do some hard 200s, and some short sprints with Sundays being purely aerobic longer distance stuff. Both days will have kick components and shoot for more than 4k meters.

That is a little less than 4.5 miles. I swam the whole workout in about 2 hours, with my normal workout being right around 4,000 yards and taking a little over an hour.

It was a good workout, and I left tired but not exhausted. Or so I thought. All I have done today is lounge around the house, eat, drink and take a short nap. Now it is the day after Christmas, so I didn’t exactly expect to be running around all energetic, but I am in sloth mode. Slowly moving from one room to another, doing tasks that don’t take much physical effort.

Christmas Eve at practice, our coach asked what we asked Santa for. I told her that I asked for a 10k yard workout, and I think this was her way of granting my wish. I could have done another 2,000 yards, but it would have been rather slow, and probably would have wiped me out for the rest of the day.

As it is, I am moving my lifting from tonight to tomorrow, so I don’t kill myself.

Merry Christmas to me!

I swam the 50M, 200M, 400M freestyles and the 100M backstroke. Maybe you will notice that the 100M freestyle is missing from that list. Well, my wife decided that she didn’t want to swim the 100M free, since she was tired and that was the last event she was registered for, so she scratched. What actually happened was that I ended up getting scratched, and I didn’t notice until I looked down at the timers clipboard that Brook’s name was listed and not mine. As there were only about 3 minutes until I was supposed to be swimming, there wasn’t anything that could be done to resolve the problem in time. That was really the only mishap of the meet.

The rest of this post will be analysis of the meet that I will be interested in the next time I enter this meet and some analysis of my swims. Nothing is likely to be of interest to anyone other then swimmers.

Getting to the Baylor Tom Landry center was not too difficult, and parking was easy, right across the street. Getting there right as warm up opens is the way to go, since getting in and getting warmed up before the pools fills with retards who stop in the middle of the lane is important, if you actually wanted to get warmed up.

I warmed up with a 400M free and a 100M back. Brook probably did more then twice this about. Lane 9 has water treadmills in it that scare most people away from joining the lane. Brook and I had the lane to ourselves the entire time I was in, and Brook only had one other person join her lane before her warmup was over.

The 400M fr was an easy swim for me, with the purpose being an fast warm up, rather than a competitive swim. I felt like I maintained a strong even pace throughout the race and finished with a time that was .3 seconds slower then my 2004 time. After my 2004 race, I remember being nearly dead, and I probably came home much faster in 2004. Results are not posted for 2008 year, so I cannot compare how I split 2008 vs. 2004.

The 50 fr immediately followed the 400fr. I got a good cool down in after the 400fr, since lane 9 and 8 were open for cool down/warm up, during the races. Again, I swam the 50fr strong, and didn’t really start kicking until the last 12.5 meters. Brook made two comments. First, it looked like I wasn’t bothering to sprint until the last 12.5, which is a comment I have heard many times. Second, she said I just need to quit bothering with 50s and focus on the 100 and 200. My time was almost .8 seconds faster then it was in 2004, which was a huge surprise. After the 50, I did only 100M warm down. The cool down lanes were packed and no one was getting any swimming done. Lots of standers in the lane, and luckily, this was a rarity, probably do to the rate that the 50s were completely and the number of heats.

After the 50, there was probably 25 to 30 minutes before the 200fr. I swam in lane one, which is the only competitive lane against the wall at this pool, and the pool floor slopes up to the wall at a 45 degree angle, putting the lane line on an angle. Other then one really strong jet, the lane wasn’t too bad, and I ended up going 4 seconds faster then in 2004 iirc. There was a problem with the timing system right before this event, and we had to step down and wait behind the blocks for a few minutes. There was a guy in lane 6 who was well matched to my speed, and I could see him and kept with him the entire race. Brook said I beat him at the end. The girl in lane 2 was miss seeded and I ended up lapping her. She ended up not finishing the race because she stopped the same time I did. My race was thoughtless, other then holding myself in reserve. I swam a strong race, but didn’t go all out until the last half length.

The 100M back immediately followed the 200M free, so I needed to cool down quickly before I had to get back up to swim the back. Brook stopped me during cool down to talk about the races, and I had to tell her that I had another swim in 2 or 3 heats and needed a quick cool down. There ended up being a meet break for 5 or 10 minutes before the back heat started, so there was plenty of time.

This was the first time I have swam the 100M back in competition. It did not feel as strong as my freestyles, but I was not disappointed with my performance. I entered the median time from 2007, but I mistakenly entered the yards conversion, not the real meters time. I was worried that I would not be able to go the yards time, but managed to bet my seed time by 3 seconds. My start did not feel horrendous, so that was an improvement over practice. Brook did tell me that I had not kickout from the wall, and if I would work on just that one thing, my time would improve considerably. Brook may not remember that my kick sucks in general, and that is the primary reason by my kickout is non existent.

There was a large break between the 100 Back and the 100 Free because the 200 IM and the 50 Breast took a fair bit of time to complete, and there were 9 heats of 100 free, which I thought I was in the 6th heat. Turns out that when Brook went to scratch, I was the one who ended up getting scratched, and I did not notice it until the heat before mine, so I was not able to swim the 100 fr.

We ended up leaving right around 11:30am. This happened to be right when I predicted we would be done with the 100M free. To figure out how long the meet would take, I took the worst time from 2007, rounded and then multipled by the number of six person heats. This approximated pretty well how long each event would take.

Brook started talking about scratching the 100 after swimming the 50fr, which surprised me. Brook had previously never had a good 200 swim, so I would have expected her to scratch the 200 and swim the 100. I think the cold was getting to her, and she wanted to swim one more race and then go get warm. It is possible if the meet was running slower, that she would have scratched both the 200M and the 100M freestyles, having already swam 3 events.

Brook was cold the entire meet. She wore her new parka, swimcaps, sweat pants and uggs whenever she was out of the water, and she was still cold. I, on the other hand, was never cold the entire meet. I started out waiting for Brook to come through the women’s locker room to the pool when we first got there, and I was too hot to leave my sweat shirt on. After warming up and wearing a long sleeved tech shirt for about 20 minutes, I stripped out of that and went shirtless for the rest of the meet, only wearing a pair of umbros and my uggs. Next time bring flip flops.

Along with being hot the entire meet, I probably drank 60 oz of water, and 24oz of that was before the meet even began. I did not drink and thing but water during the meet and only a sip of gatorade after the meet. During the meet I did not eat anything.

For breakfast before the meet, I had 2 eggos, a plain omlette and a latte. After the meet, we stopped at Chipotle and picked up burritos, and I washed mine down with a half a bottle of wine. I did not drink any alcohol for the month leading up to the meet, and for the week leading up to the meet, I ate paste rich meals. My lunches were baked ziti, with dark meat chicken, with meat lovers pizza on Friday at Joes. The two nights before the meet, were spaghetti with butter garlic shrimp and spaghetti with italian sausage. The whole week was well planned so I did not worry about being hungry. Breakfasts were eggos and omlettes, with Endurox after workouts.

The swim workouts were Wed., Thurs, Friday before the meet Saturday because Shannon was out of town Mon and Tues. Thursday I swam hard and Friday morning I was sore when I got into the water. Friday, I swam the entire workout at a recovery pace, only doing a pull set fast. Friday’s workout ended up only being 3600 yards, while Wed and Thurs were 4100 and 4200 with more hard sets. I did not spend much time on starts, only practicing starts a half dozen times, maybe 3 weeks before the meet and spending no time on turns.

During high school, I remember being tired, but I was working out over 40 hours a week. Now, I work out at most six hours a week, and I am regularly physically exhausted.

I just wanted to point out how I realized I was getting old.