Recently I got to thinking about my swim times. It was after a tough workout and I was feeling a little down because I had barely hung on during the workout. Sometimes it is hard to not compare yourself to others and so I was trying to think of positive goals for myself and my swim times.
In my head, I decided my goal should be to hit a 1:25 per 100/yd. Back before the end of the year, I did a workout with Kyla and managed to squeak out a 1:29 at the end of our 100 yd repeats. I was so proud of that accomplishment and since then I have been doing pretty good at hitting 1:30-1:35 in our workouts.
Today one of our workout partners was running late so Brent and I decided to do some 100's to kickoff the workout. We didn't set a number for the repeats but thought that 5 would be a good start. We did the 100's on a 1:50 interval and I was getting around 15-20 sec rest. At the start of the 4th, Brent decided we should continue and do 10 total 100's. Yikes!
On each 100, I managed a flip turn at the first turn but after that I was too flustered to flip turn and so I was doing open turns. I knew that it would save me time to do flip turns but my timing just felt off and the open turns felt more comfortable. My times were coming in pretty consistently and I decided to keep pushing for a little faster each one.
Finally on the last 100 I managed to get somewhere in the 1:25-6 range. It was great...and only slightly painful after the 9 previous repeats! If only I had done flip turns on all 3 of the turns within the 100 my time could have been a little lower.
The recovery time between each repeat was one reason why I stayed so consistent and lowered my time on the last one. I will keep trying to hit this pace in my workouts and improve my speed over distances.
I ended up with 2000 yds for my lunch workout. After the 100's we did a easy pace set while our other workout partner got warmed up. Then it was some 75's on the 1:20. I only did 4 of the 75's before starting a quick cool down.
My swim total for the year is now at just over 50 miles which puts me at 20% progress on my distance goal for the year. I think it will be helpful to add some other time goals to work on over the year too. Wish me luck!
Good luck Whitney! I'm pretty sure my lifetime swim total is probably less than 50 miles so you're off to a fabulous start for the year in my opinion.
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