Not as long as I thought

Posted on January 20, 2009 by jt

When I showed up for practice tonight, the warm-up was 10 x 75 yards on 1:10. I immediately decided it was going to be another long practice. I started thinking that Tuesdays were the long days and Thursdays were the stroke days. But I was wrong. We ended up doing more stroke work and then a bunch of kicking.

We ended the workout with something our coach calls “animal kicking”. We split into groups across 4 lanes to do 10 x 50 kicking. Each lane has it’s own speed and time limit. The “animal” lane was the fastest, sporting a 1:00 time limit. The next 3 lanes were 1:10, 1:15, and 1:20. If you come in with more than 10 seconds to rest, you get to (have to) move up a lane. If you come in after the time limit then you get bumped down a lane. I knew this would be trouble for me, so I started myself in the 1:15 lane. I came in at 1:00 on the first 50 and had to move up to the 1:10 lane. After another 2 or 3 rounds (and most everyone getting bumped all the way to the 1:20 lane — and still not making the time), the time limits increased by 10 seconds on each lane. We finished up that way.

Only two people ever made it to the “animal” lane: Chelsea started there and never got bumped out, and Charmaine moved up into it after the first round, but got bumped back down into my lane sometime after round 3. The coach promised we’d be adding that workout to our mix at least once a week, so we’ll see how it goes next time.

After practice he sent out an email to the group with some links to videos on YouTube that demonstrate freestyle stroke technique:

After watching the videos, I ran the groups email addresses through Facebook and added a few as friends.

Stroke Drills

Posted on January 16, 2009 by jt

Last night’s masters swim practice wasn’t as painful as the one on Tuesday. Instead of focusing on pain and suffering through long sets of kicking, we got a crash course in each of the major strokes. With each new coach, I find I learn something new. The main ideas I picked up last night were…

Breaststroke: keep my elbows higher, improve the timing of my kick compared to my recovery, and really attack the recovery.

Backstroke: four strokes from the flags to the wall (ok, it’s not new, but there are no flags at Gold’s Gym, so it’s new to me), the tea-cup method for entering the water pinky-first and exiting the water thumb-first.

Butterfly: pulling down the center of my body instead of out to the side, improved the flow of my body through the water with the dolphin kick.

Here we go again now…

Posted on January 15, 2009 by jt

Messing around in the pool at Gold’s Gym isn’t the same as a real swim workout. I have known this since the beginning, but it was always so much easier to “swim” at lunch at Gold’s Gym that it would have been to get up at 5:00 to swim before work. Charmaine did get me to the 50m pool in American Fork once last summer, but the masters swim team had just switched their schedule, so we swam alone. That also wasn’t the same as swimming with the real team, with a real coach, etc.

That point was drilled home to me earlier this week when I got in the water the new evening program for masters swimming at American Fork pool. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I haven’t ever swam with any sort of masters program before, and a program at night seems like it might be the swimming equivalent of night classes in college. It may be that equivalent, but it was still all I could handle. We swim from 8:30 to 10:00 Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means tonight will be round 2. I’m still very sore from round 1, but I’m also excited to see if I can survive another workout. I think if I make it through 4 or 5 of these I’ll actually start to improve.

There is a coach that looks like he just finished swimming for some college somewhere, and he seems to know what he’s doing. He watches each of us as we swim and corrects us when we do drills incorrectly, etc. That’s a lot more than I expected. I didn’t even think the morning program would have a coach that attentive (who knows? maybe they don’t?). So I think my $30/month is money well spent.

Tuesday’s workout consisted mostly of kicking exercises, which was a real shame, since I got on the treadmill for the first time in a long time just the day before that. Needless to say, my legs were completely used up after swimming. My flippers must be a little bit too big, because my right foot wound up pretty beat up from all the kicking. I’m guessing we kicked almost 2000 yards and swam another 1000. The coach said we swam 3050 yards. I thought we may have only swam 2650, because we cut the main set short by 400, but he may have taken that into account. We also swam 400 or so before the workout started that I don’t think were counted in that 3050 number, so I’m guessing we did at least that much when all is said and done.

Big Day Back

Posted on December 17, 2007 by jt

I haven’t been feeling 100% the last week. I’ve had a bit of a cough that has kept me mostly out of the pool and in front of a computer screen. Ok, the cough doesn’t have much to do with sitting in front of the computer, but maybe sitting in front of the computer for so long has something to do with having the cough. At any rate, I haven’t been doing much swimming lately, but all that changed today.

I normally harass people at my office about going to the gym with me. A few years ago there was a good-sized group that would go and lift a few times each week. In fact, at the peak there were almost too many to be able to do the same workouts. Times have changed. There are very few people with a membership to Gold’s Gym these days. Some of the old gang have moved on to other jobs, but most of them (including some that left for other jobs) have just stopped going… and let their memberships lapse. So when I question people about going to the gym, I expect to be turned down 9 out of 10 times.

Sandi has been increasing her rhetoric about wanting to train for a triathlon next spring. She’s been running a lot and swims from time to time. Today was one of those times. She said she would go if we went at 5:30. Well… 5:30 came and went and I wasn’t at a place where I could leave my office, so she went without me. That’s the type of behavior that needs to be rewarded, so I did my best to get their quickly.

I pushed her harder than I usually do and she really took to it. I was impressed.

Charmaine finished up at her office and came by as Sandi was finishing her 1000 yards. So we swam another 1000 or so. It’s been a long time since Charmaine has been swimming with me. I pushed her pretty hard as well. We were both tired by the end.

300 Free warm-up
4 x 50 Fly stroke-drill
25, 50, 75, 100 Free negative-split
100, 75, 50, 25 Kick negative-split
2 x 50 Free fast
100 Free easy
4 x 100 Free negative-split
100 Free easy
2 x 50 Free pull – no paddles
8 x 50 Kick negative-split
100 Free easy
2 x 50 Free fast
100 Free warm-down
————
2500 yards

Less of the same

Posted on December 4, 2007 by jt

As I was driving home at 4:00 last night (this morning?) I wondered aloud if I would be able to swim at all today, knowing that I had a new employee starting and that I would need to be back at work by 8:30. I didn’t actually get to work until about 8:45, and I did manage to hit the pool… but it turned out to be a poor excuse for a workout.

300 Free warm-up
2 x 200 Free
2 x 100 Kick
100 Free warm-down
————
1000 yards

Hurry-Up Offense

Posted on December 3, 2007 by jt

When the losing team has the ball in the final two minutes of a football game they go into something commonly known as the hurry-up offense. I had an extremely small amount of time to swim today, but I made sure to go. I don’t know that I got much out of it other than sticking to my commitment to swim. Like many teams that resort to the hurry-up offense, I didn’t win today.

300 Free warm-up
4 x 100 Free
2 x 100 Kick
100 Free warm-down
————
1000 yards

Missed a day

Posted on November 30, 2007 by jt

I’m not sure why, probably the pressure from Mike to get something in the blog again, but I was writing a blog post about the previous day directly before I went to work out. That doesn’t work very well for me… This time I waited until after I hit the pool to write about it.

In case you didn’t catch the subtlety there, I didn’t work out yesterday. I may not have even eaten yesterday I was so busy. Luckily Charmaine came in around dinner time with some pasta from the Pizza Factory in Lindon. The next time I looked up it was after midnight.

Today I am just as busy as yesterday. We’re trying to ship a new version of our software in the next couple days, so there’s an insane amount of things to get done… all at the last minute. But that’s the life of software engineering. I hate it when I miss two days in a row, so I forced myself to take an hour and hit the pool. Between driving, undressing, dress, and driving again, an hour doesn’t leave a lot of time for swimming, so I made my sets longer with less rest.

300 Free warm-up
4 x 200 Free (I’m guessing about 45 seconds to a minute rest between each)
4 x 100 Kicking (negative split: each 25 must be faster than the previous one)
200 Free warm-down
————
1700 yards

I lied about running yesterday

Posted on November 29, 2007 by jt

I didn’t mean to lie about it, but I did. I brought all my running stuff to work, but I ended up not running. I decided to swim at lunch, so I could run with Charmaine in the evening… but then I got in the zone at work and didn’t look up until it was almost 9 at night.

So here’s what I did in the pool:

500 Free warm-up
4 x 100 Free (Gold’s Gym sucks, the clock has been broken for about 45 days now)
4 x 50 Lungbuster (breathing every 3,5,7,9 strokes)
4 x 50 Freestyle Stroke Drill
2 x 100 IM (no stroke-drills, full strokes only)
200 Free warm-down
————
1700 yards

Triathlon Bound

Posted on November 28, 2007 by jt

A lot of the people I meet at the pool seem to be there for a specific purpose: training for a triathlon. They usually tell me that I should do a triathlon. According to them, I would be good. What they don’t know is that I may swim like an animal, but I can’t run worth crap, and I don’t have a road bike. Despite all that, I’ve decided that I am going to do a triathlon next year… not because I think I’ll do well, but because I think it will be fun.

I’m relatively sure that my running skills are my weakest link in getting ready for a triathlon, so I’ve started running on a treadmill once a week. Well, I’ve just barely started, so we’ll see how long I hold out. The first day I ran 2.0 miles at 6.5 miles per hour. That’s right, I was only “running” for about 20 minutes before I was dead. Interestingly enough, it was only my muscles that were dead. Cardiovascularly (is that a word?), I was fine. I couldn’t walk for the next 4 days and was still quite sore on days 5 and 6. But the next week came and I ran 3.2 miles in 31 minutes. I was pretty happy with that result. And the best part was that I only felt sore for about a day. After that I skipped a week, then ran 2 miles the week after that. I tried to run at 8.0 miles per hour for the first mile, but I only made it to about 0.75 mile marker before I had to walk. Since then I’ve skipped another week.

But today is Wednesday again, and that’s the day I’m supposed to run. So I’ll be heading out to run in about 15 minutes. I just wanted to get that in there in case I forget to post about it after lunch.

Driven by fear

Posted on August 31, 2007 by jt

We had a code review during lunch, so I wasn’t able to go swimming until later today. I haven’t missed a day in a long time and I wasn’t going to miss today, just because of poor scheduling. I arrived around 4:45 and noticed a sign at the front desk as I was showing them my barcode. The sign said the pool would be closing at 5:00 every Friday night for the next month, so they could “hyper-chlorinate” it over the weekend. I didn’t read when it would reopen, but I’m guessing sometime Monday. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Why do they need to “hyper-chlorinate” the pool? Because the government says so. There have been an unusually high number of cases of children getting sick at public pools this year due to Cryptosporidium infection. The decision to hyper-chlorinate and close the pool at Gold’s Gym is wrong on so many levels that it’s almost sad. It did make me realize the true nature of health clubs and gyms, though. They don’t exist to help people exercise or get in shape or anything of the sort. They exist solely to make money. They don’t care if you ever show up, as long as you keep paying. In fact, they probably prefer it if you don’t show up, because that only makes it easier to sell more memberships.

Chlorination is used to kill most viruses, bacteria, and protozoa like Giardia, but studies have shown that Cryptosporidium is more than 200,000 times more resistant to chlorine than Giardia. It has been shown that Cryptosporidium spores are almost completely unaffected after more than 18 hours of exposure to 3% chlorine; they are still fully viable. Anyone that does much wilderness survival hiking knows that Chlorine and Iodine may inactivate many waterborne pathogens, but you need ultra filtration or reverse osmosis to remove the Cryptosporidium spores from your water.

The primary transmission method is fecal matter of children under five years of age (and old people that have lost their ability to control their bowels) in the water at public pools. I have never seen a child under five years of age anywhere inside a Gold’s Gym… ever. And I’m there almost every day. So how would an indoor pool that has never had a child step foot in it be at risk of leaky diapers? It just doesn’t make sense.

I did my best to swim 1000 yards before they kicked me out around 5:10.

Swim:
300 Free warm-up
200 Free
100 Kick
200 Free
100 Kick
100 Free warm-down
————
1000 yards

jtalbot/swim

swimming again after all these years