Another Good Day in the Pool

First up sorry for all the play by play on all these workouts.  Once I get into the season I'll stop writing about the day to day monotony of training so much and get into some other things....   but for now every workout is a step in the right direction and I like writing about and thinking about them....

Today I didn't have to be at work till 11am which gave me a great chance to get a double in.  I thought about riding today but Im trying to stick to my normal training schedule I laid out the other day as much as possible so I stuck to the plan which has today as a swim and strength day.  So I got up at 6am and headed to the hotel pool.

Today I shared my usually private hotel pool with two other swimmers.  All of us were doing laps though so it all worked out.  Theres nothing worse than trying to do laps when you have leisure swimmers about.  I should note they have every right to be in the pool too...  it is a vacation destination after all.  Its just they accidentally get in the way a lot and it makes serious lap swimming tricky...  which is why super early is the best time to do it.  Anyway...   three of us trying to do laps was interesting as there are no lane lines in the pool.  There are also these funky cutouts in the corners you have to avoid with steps and railings.  So three of us had to sort of create our own lap lanes in the middle of the pool.  I think we were all a little guilty of drifting a little bit but we managed to avoid each other for the most part.

When I first started my swim today my arms were pretty tired from yesterday's swim.  I was unsure how it was going to feel and wondered if trying to swim this year on back to back days was a good plan or not.  But I really want 4 days of swimming in my plan in order to improve so I did my best to stick to it.

I started with a 200 warmup that felt like an enternity.  Hmmm....   this was going to be a tough workout!  And then from there went into a ladder that went like this...  25..50..75..100..125..150..125..100..75..50..25.  This ladder was only supposed to have ten seconds rest between each leg but I rested much longer than that between the longer sets.  I was beat!  But I figure 20-25 seconds rest was better than stopping swimming and starting any sooner than that on my current level of swim fitness just wasn't happening today.  Once I finished that the workout had 700 yards left in it.  I was feeling pretty tired and since my sunday endurance swim was a joke I decided to just do the 700 in one go.  So I did the 700 in one shot and called it a day.  1800 yards done!  I felt pretty good about the workout and especially the 700.  I'm starting to feel my body position get better again and I think I'm finally getting my legs under control to the point I'm not out of breath all the time.  So things are slowly improving in the water.  Its definitely going to be about consistency, consistency, consistency!  Thats the biggest key.  I can let anything else go during the week for my schedule or whatever but I HAVE to keep swimming.  Besides...   I've decided to set a reward for myself.

The first time I can swim 1.2 miles without a wetsuit on in a continuos swim (pool or open water) I'm allowed to buy myself a swimsense swimming watch that I've had my eye on for keeping track of my pool workouts.  No 1.2 mile swim sans wetsuit...   no swimsense.  This swim can't have any rests in it whatsoever.  Nor can it have any stroke changes in it.  It has to be freestyle all the way.

So...   with my swim done I towelled off and went upstairs to start my strength training workout.  Normally I'd take a rest and swim in the morning and do TRX at lunch or in the afternoon or evening.  But today I had to do it back to back.  So I went pretty much right into it.  Today instead of using the dvd that comes with the TRX I used the "fit deck" I bought with the trx.  A Fit Deck is a stack of playing cards with TRX Excercises on them.  You can shuffle the deck, use some cards but not all, or use all of them.  Today I decided what the hec and used all of them.

The nice part about this was that there were some new excercises in there which were great.  So it was nice to change it up a bit.  The not so nice part is some of them were damn hard!  By the time I got to the core section that I put at the end I was toast!  I barely managed it through the crunches.  I was struggling!  My arms were so tired from swimming on back to back days and already doing all the sets of arm excercises.  So when I got to core and had to do planks and crunches I was dying!  Then I saved the hardest for last which are called "Atomic Pushups".  These are evil, evil things!  You susped yourself in the plan position like seen in the crunch card in the photo.  And then you do a crunch just like in that photo and go back to plank, and then do a pushup.  Thats one rep.  Each set is 10 reps.  Twenty of those at the end of the workout after two days of back to back swims will destroy your arms.  I'm sore just typing this!  But sore is good!  Its only going to get easier if I keep up with it which will only make me stronger!

So all in all a great day of training today.  And now time for a long day of work.  Show starts in about thirty minutes and we go till 6pm, then take it all down and reset it in a smaller configuration for tomorrows show in the same venue using only half the room.  Fun!  Gonna be a LONG day!  Still I'm psyched about the 700.  I could have gone longer too.  I know I have a 1000 yard set in me that I'm saving to do on Sunday I think.  Hopefully my arms will be up to it after sitting in the aero position for a few hours on Saturday.  I'll have to do my best to keep them good and relaxed.