The night started with coach Durant telling me he thinks I should train to compete in the 1650 (1 mile) event at some future masters swim meet. I told him I used to be a sprinter and that I doubt I’d be very competitive in the mile, but he thinks I may. Who knows? I have been feeling pretty good when we swim longer distances.

I swam in lane 1 tonight. I’ve decided to start calling it the Axe Grinder, because when I swim on my back I inevitably wind up grinding my left hand against the wall at some point. Jeff and Chelsea were also in the Axe Grinder lane, but they didn’t have quite as much trouble as I did. Actually, one of them did complain about hitting their hand on the ladder in the middle of the pool. I think that counts. But hey, at least we didn’t have to fight with the SCUBA team.

There were 4 people in lane 2. Leading that lane was Sabrina. She’s only 20 years old and still really fast. She killed me on the kicking sets, but I stayed ahead of her on the fly sets. We both knew the other was trying to win, so we wound up pushing a little bit harder than we would have otherwise. That’s what it’s all about.

Warm-Up (1000):
400 free
300 kick choice with fins
200 free pull
100 back

Main Set (1650):
6 x 50 fly kick on our back, hands down on 0:45 with fins
5 x 100 free on 1:40 (2 white, 2 pink, 1 red)
6 x 25 on 0:30 drill choice
6 x 25 fly drill on 0:40 (3 kicks underwater, 1 full stroke) with fins
6 x 25 fly drill on 0:45 (1 left, 1 full, 1 right, 1 full) with fins

We worked on open turns for about 15 minutes

4 x 25 hammer-down drill (12.5 race-pace, 10 seconds vertical kicking with arms raised high, 12.5 race-pace)
4 x 25 hammer-down drill with fins
2 x 100 (75 pull, 25 scull)

We have been told that Chocolate Milk is the best recovery drink after a workout. Even the top Olympic athletes drink it. Our coach brought chocolate milk and strudel to our workout tonight. He even admitted what many of us were thinking… that we really didn’t work hard enough in our last practice to earn donuts. I think we ended up earning them last night.

Charmaine was sick and didn’t go to practice, so I brought a few “extra” strudels home to her. We had a pretty good group though. I was in lane 1 all night, with people doing SCUBA training underneath me. Actually, if the SCUBA people had stayed underneath us, it would have been fine, but they kept coming up on the ladder in the middle of our lane. Their equipment was huge and blocked most the lane, which isn’t a good thing when you have multiple people swimming butterfly in the same lane. It suddenly became clear why Chelsea said she didn’t want to swim in the same lane as “SCUBA Steve” again… at the time I thought she was making reference to one of the guys on the team and couldn’t figure out why she was upset with him. LOL.

Warm-Up (1800):
3 x 300 free with 20 seconds rest
2 x 300 kicking choice on 6:00 with fins
2 x 150 kicking choice on 3:00 with fins

Main Set (1950):
12 x 50 (25 fly, 25 free) on 1:10 with fins (coming in under 0:35)
6 x 25 stroke drill choice on 0:30
8 x 150 free pulling on 10 seconds rest

I must have pushed really hard tonight, because I’m having a really hard time remembering what we did. I know there was a lot of fly and a lot of fly kicking, but I’m struggling to pull it out of my head right now. I think I’m pretty close, but feel free to correct me.

Coach Durant made me and Jeff do full-stroke fly when others were doing fly drill. He even made sure I didn’t breathe every stroke. It was tough.

At the end of practice he challenged the whole team to swim a 25 underwater without fins for donuts. He then added that if I could swim a 62.5 under water without fins, that he’d bring chocolate milk and donuts on Thursday. I checked my pulse. 120. I knew I wouldn’t make it, but at least I made the 25. Everyone else made the 25 as well, and some guys made it another half length, which convinced Coach Durant to bring chocolate milk anyway (even though I didn’t make my 2.5 lengths underwater). I guess I should practice that sometime.

Warm-Up (800):
300 Streamline Freestyle kicking on our sides
2 x 50 one-arm fly
16 x 25 (3 x free, free, fly; 1 x free) with fins on 0:40

Main Set (2100):
10 x 50 fly kick 360 (left-side, stomach, right-side, back, repeat) with fins on 1:00
1 x 200 easy
8 x 100 fly kick on our backs (hands down) with fins on 2:00 (coming in under 1:30)
12 x 75 (4 x free-fly-free, 4 x fly-free-fly, 4 x free-fly-free) with fins on 1:30
1 x 200 easy

Bonus:
1 x 25 underwater without fins

It started off as a smaller group tonight, but we still had a lot of fun. We didn’t work on butterfly until the end of practice, but I’m guessing we’ll get back to stroke technique next Tuesday. In the mean-time, coach Durant has sent out instructions for our extra workout this week. I’m going to try to get it done on Saturday.

I was pretty happy with my initial 800. I started in the same lane as Chelsea and somehow wound up smoking her. I had her go first, because I was pretty sure she would beat me swimming distance freestyle, but I was wrong. I wound up passing her a few times before the end. That was really fun. Later she got me moved over into the fast kicking lane on our 3 x 150s. We really have a good group of people at practice.

Warm-Up (1400):
1 x 800 free @ 12:00 (1:30/100 pace)
3 x 200 kick with fins @ 2:30

Main Set (1600):
3 x 150 kick with fins @ 1:30
4 x 25 drill @ 0:30
10 x 50 animal kicking @ 1:20
3 x 150 pulling @ 10 seconds rest
1 x 100 easy

Fly stroke technique work in the shallow end

For some reason, I had started thinking that this month of fly training would really stress my shoulders. I had been noticing my shoulders being the most sore part on my body and even twitching from time to time after swimming fly in our previous workouts. I blame that line of thinking for convincing me it would be cool to start riding our bikes yesterday. Today was almost entirely a legs day. So much for my previous line of thought.

We had a new guy start tonight. I think he said his name was Rich, but I wasn’t paying all that much attention. I also noticed that Jeff didn’t show up… something about skiing all day. Chelsea wasn’t there either. I thought Mark was going to show up. He didn’t, but it was still a pretty good sized group.

Warm-Up:
10 x 75 free on 1:30
12 x 25 free drill / building
1 x 125 easy
1 minute ‘body-fly’ (arms across chest, doing vertical dolphin kick)

Main Set:
2 x 200 dolphin kick on 3:00 – on our backs, with fins, streamline
3 x 150 dolphin kick on 2:10 – on our backs, with fins, streamline
6 x 50 dolphin kick on 1:00 – on our backs, no fins, hands down
6 x 25 dolphin kick on 1:00 – underwater, no fins, streamline
8 minutes body-dolphin (i almost lost it)

Warm-Down:
1 x 125 easy
4 x power turn
1 x 125 easy

A few days ago, coach Durant asked if any of us would like him to give us additional workouts that we could do on our own time. Some of us accepted the challenge, and coach Durant sent the following workout:

Warm Up
2X ( 100 free, back
        4 x 50 Fly )

Kick
3 x 200 Free @3:00
3 x 100 fly back breast @ 1:30
4 x 50 free all out @1:00

Main Set
3 x 300 Free with Fins @ 4:30
3 x 150 Free w/o Fins @ 2:15
3 x 75 Fly, Back, Free @ 1:30

Warm Down
10 x 50 drill swim @ 10 sec rest

Total 3775

Feel free to complete the whole thing:)

Charmaine and I went to the pool in AF and attempted the workout. We had to make some modifications, due to circumstances out of our control. For example, the workout is clearly meant for SCY, but the AF pool was configured for LCM, so we had to cut the 3 x 75s to 3 x 50s, and adjust the interval times from yards to meters (and I didn’t know the appropriate conversion). There were no small kickboards available, so we used the old full-sized kickboards. There was no clock, but we found an old swim clock and pulled it over to one end of the pool and plugged it in. This allowed us to check our times at the 100 mark, but not from the 50 mark (you just can’t see the second hand on that clock from 50m away).

Bottom line, we did the distance, but not on the intervals. Most everything ended up being adding 10 or 20 seconds rest after each interval. I was still happy we did 3700 meters in less than 2 hours.

I’m guessing I didn’t fully recover from all the fly we did 2 days ago, because tonight was really rough for me… and there’s no good reason for it. The only good part of the night (for me) was the very end when we had an underwater distance swimming competition doing breast stroke pull-downs. On the very last one, I swam a full 50 without coming up. That earned us an additional 2 doughnuts, so we’re now up to 5.

The high school swimmers that have been swimming in the lanes next to us are done for the year. They have their Region competition this week and then State competition after that. It’s a good thing, too, because we had 12 people tonight. A new girl named Sabrina who used to swim for Lone Peak High was there, and she was fast. The ex-BYU swimmer was also back. I think her name is Jann. Next week we should have even more, as Charmaine says Mark is going to join us as well.

I didn’t have a very good practice overall. The beginning was especially rough, and by the time we were doing the 6 x 150 free set, I could barely recover my arms in front of me. It was pretty pathetic. Maybe I’m slightly sick. It seems everyone else at my work has been *really* sick lately. Multiple people have missed 4 days or more. I haven’t missed any, and I think I owe a large part of my health to swimming. Hopefully I’ll be back to normal by next week.

Warm-up:
2 x ( 200 free, 50 fly drill, 50 back drill ) with fins
3 x 50 free on 1:00 – 25 easy, 25 fast
3 x 50 free on 1:00 – 25 fast, 25 easy
1 x 50 free – all out
4 x 25 stroke drill choice on 0:30

Main set:
6 x 150 free on 2:15 (or 10 seconds rest)
4 x 25 stroke drill choice on 0:30

Learning breaststroke pull-downs
6 x 25 breaststroke kick with pull-buoy
breast stroke pull-down distance competition

Next month we will be concentrating on Butterfly. In March we’ll move to Backstroke, and in April we’ll focus on Breaststroke. I don’t know how I’ll make it, but I’m excited to try.

Tonight started with 6 x 150 kicking with fins (150 fly, 150 back, 150 free, repeat) getting 10 seconds rest. By the end of the warm-up, we had 10 people! It’s always more fun with more people. There was a girl there tonight that had really good technique and was really fast. I didn’t catch her name, but the rumour is that she swam for BYU. It wouldn’t surprise me.

The second part of our warm-up consisted of 3 sets of 4 x 25 free on 0:40. We did these fast-slow, slow-fast, slow-slow, and fast-fast, then repeated. The fast-slow after the fast-fast was the killer. Even though we got the maximum amount of time to rest after the fast-fast 25, we were still breathing really hard when it was time to start off fast again. I guess this goes to show that we’re not really in good shape just yet, either that or we were really pushing hard on those fast segments. I’m betting on the former.

After warm-up we worked on our backstroke flipturns once again. We started off doing backstroke from the middle of the pool to the middle of the pool with a flipturn halfway through. We must not have done a good enough job (I missed the wall completely on one of them), so we switched to swimming freestyle to the wall, flipping over and staying on our back, then swimming back to the middle of the pool on our backs.

We’re all fairly competitive, so the flip-turn exercise quickly turned into a competition. Coach Durant reorganized our lanes into teams he said were fairly close and we did a couple relays. The first relay was freestyle. I led our lane off and did really well. I think I may have even surprised some people with my speed. Our lane won that one easily. The next one was a full 50. 25 free, flip to your back, 25 back. I lead off again, but it was a lot closer. We still built a sizeable lead, so coach had some people in the other lane leave a few seconds early to even things out, but we still won (thanks to the amazing speed of the new girl).

Our main set was all about fly. Luckily we’re still using fins for a lot of this or I certainly would have died. I felt like I got close enough as it was.

4 x 25 fly drill with fins (left, together, right, together) on 0:40
4 x 50 dolphin kick with fins on our back on 1:00
4 x 100 fly drill with fins (3 left, 3 right, 3 together) on 1:40

After that first set, we were so dead that he let us swim our next set of 4 x 25 all freestyle.

4 x 25 free easy with fins on 0:40
4 x 50 dolphin kick with fins on our back on 1:00
4 x 100 fly drill with fins (3 left, 3 right, 3 together) on 1:40

We finished up with an easy 200 free pulling.