A Swimming Milestone

I dragged my sorry carcass to Masters last night with legs completely hosed. Wednesday night I had run my little tush off for my fastest run test to date. The next day consisted of a work day that ended later than anticipated, a hurried endurance ride on stiff quads, and eating dinner (a Kashi bar) in the car on the way to swimming.

My new habit for swimming is to not look at the entire workout before getting in pool, but go from one line of each set to the next. When I preview any workout, there's the inevitable "*Sigh* Pull sets, again!" or "Aw, man! Not IM. Ugh..." or "Pffftt! I'm not swimming more than 100 yards in a row."

I guess the only pool workout that wouldn't elicit that kind of reaction from me would go like this:

Warm-up: Cannonball of the 1m diving board x3, rest 2 min in between while eating a cupcake

Main set: 15 min game of Marco Polo

Underwater handstand x 5 in deep end, rest 2 min with cupcake

Doggy paddle 25 x 4, concentrate on emulating family canine pet

Cool down: 100 easy with foam noodle thingy

Splash water at Kevin liberally

Last night's workout looked nothing like the above. It went more like: drill, pull, kick, swim, swim hard, pull, kick, drill, repeat x 10,000. The finale was a timed 200 IM. By then, I was hungry enough to chew off my arm and figured the sooner I got this done the sooner I could start snacking on my fingers. Now to all you fishies out there, 200 IM may be a mere sneeze. However, to me, it's an anaerobic flail-n-looks-like-she's-drowning effort. In fact, until last night I'd never completed a 200 IM without having to stop either after aspirating half of the pool's water during backstroke or moving backwards doing the breaststroke or making the life guard nervous with my butterfly. I can't say I felt great when I finally made it to the freestyle part but I wasn't completely seized up with lactic acid in my usual fashion. I had done it: 200 IM without stopping or dying of hypoxia.

I was so proud of myself I added a couple of underwater flips to my warm down.