2014 One Hour Postal Swim

It's nearing the end of January but on Friday my friends and I still managed to sneak in our annual One Hour Postal Swim.  The Postal Swim is a national swim meet that you hold at a location and time of your choosing.  Once complete, then you mail in your results and that is how the meet becomes Postal! There are various postal meet events through out the year with US Masters Swimming but January is known for the One Hour Postal Swim.

This year, we gathered again on a Friday evening to hold the swim.  Our pool has lanes in use after work for one of the local swim club teams.  We managed to get the final two lanes in the pool except we had five swimmers.  Luckily the next lane over was a pro-triathlete who was willing to split the lane with us.  There isn't much fanfare to the one hour swim.  Our timers sit in chairs at the end of the lane.  They each have a stop watch/ iPhone to time with and a split sheet to track the splits for each swimmer.  The splits are kept per each 50 yard lap of the pool.

Lori, Jeff, Me, Brent, and Jeff

We select a time to start and then with a jump into the pool everyone is off and swimming.  Once again, Lori and I shared a lane this year.  I think Lori and I have shared a lane for almost every year that I have done the one hour postal swim.  She is much faster than me and that provides me with mental entertainment during the swim as I try to calculate how many laps it takes her to lap me or other silly things.

This year I made the decision to count laps for every 500 yards.  It helped me gauge the amount of time that I had been swimming and stay mentally focused.  I went into the event without a goal and very fearful that my distance was going to be much lower than I wanted.  My swimming this fall has been hit and miss as work has sometimes overtaken my life.  Counting the laps led to me doing some math to try and calculate out what distance a 50 sec 50 yard pace would cover which was equal to 3600 yards.

I had asked Jon, Lori's husband, who was timing for the two of us to give us a 10 minute warning.  His warning came and I definitely felt like I had to pick up the pace to try and get my remaining laps in and try to hit 3600 yards.  I ended up with 3560 yards in the one hour time.  This equates out to a pace of 1:41 per 100 yard which I was happy with for the most part.  My distance in 2013 was 3580 yards so it was a little disappointing to miss that distance by 20 yards or less than one length.  That equates out to 1/3 yard per minute which is so negligible in the long haul.

Below is my distance history for this event.  Every year I am so happy when it is over! With that...12 months until I have to do a solid hour swim again! The best part of this event is definitely the dinner and social time afterwards with my buds.

2014 - 3560 yards
2013 - 3580 yards
2012 - 3440 yards
2011 - 3295 yards
2010 - 2935 yards