Friday, April 01, 2016

So hey, that swim's not half bad.

So that crazy week of workouts?

I'm getting most of them in! With LOTS of help.  My parents were super awesome yesterday and offered to watch the kids so I could swim.

Got up early and ran 7 miles on the treadmill (gross, but necessary) and then had breakfast with the kids.  Then, my mom came over and I took off for the pool around 10.

Got there, walked into the locker room, and saw LOTS AND LOTS of older ladies.

Oh no. That could only mean one thing.

I dashed out to the pool and saw they had already removed the lane lines.  One of my former students was guarding, so I asked him, "Hey, is there a water aerobics class today?"

He replied, "yep, in 5 minutes."

FAIL

So I had to swim in the super hot and super annoying 20 yard pool...it reminded me of last time's Ironman when TriEric and I did a ton of training in the warm gross YMCA that was 20 yards.  (Why the water aerobics classes aren't in the warmer pool, I will never know.)

So, sigh.

I had a nice workout all ready to go but it was very time-specific and had 50s and stuff in it and there was just no way.

I remembered that another swim workout I was supposed to do involved 3 X 1000s.  I didn't remember the specifics, but I figured that if I could just get in 3X1000 in the small, hot, annoying pool, that would be good enough.

Busted it out in around 53 minutes, counting a few times of getting my old cap adjusted and my goggles to stop sucking my eyeballs out of my head.  So that was a good confidence booster, because if I can swim 3000 yards in 53 minutes with no training and no trouble, I'll be able to work my way up to the roughly 4250ish that are in Ironman by September 11.

(The key, of course, is to get to the point where that feels like an easy warmup, and I can't say that was the case yesterday.)

But, hey!  I needed that.

Tomorrow I'm going to run with Ana and try to get in 1:40-1:50 as some good base miles.  Then, if I can squeeze in a swim Sunday somehow, I will have done all the workouts that Coach Emily asked me to, although I had to shorten a few.  What started as me thinking I couldn't even get in half has turned into me almost getting most in!

Progress, indeed.