The Swimming Thread

[psyang]

A little update to bump this thread. It's been just over a year since I started the thread and at that time, I had swum 40 lengths in 20:20.

I've been fairly regular with my twice-a-week swims, though I took some time off in the spring when I threw out my back, and then I took another 6 weeks or so off in the summer because, well, summer. About 3 months ago, I started trying to swim 3 times a week since I found myself getting up anyway to drive my daughter to early morning band/choir practices. I noticed a real improvement in my times and I started to consistently swim under 20 minutes for 40 lengths.

Today the pool was mostly empty, and I swam 19:30, almost 5 seconds off my PB. I guess my next goal is to go under 19 minutes.

Just discovered one of my friends used to be a big swimmer. He's in his 50s now, but when he was a teenager, he swam 2 hours a day and could do 30 lengths in 8 minutes. That sounds insane to me. But through the fall, we shared the pool with the local high school's swim club, and I was able to get a sense for how fast trained swimmers really are. Their stroke rate isn't twice as fast, but their speed is.

[Ironhorse]

Thanks for bumping the thread. I ended up with 178km of swimming last year, not doing much from October on due to marathon training. Getting back into it again over the past 5 weeks or so, in preparation for training season to start. It's amazing how quickly you lose your speed after a few months off. Being old doesn't help. Going sub-19 on 1,000 is something I've yet to do, I've gone sub 30 in a 1,500 lake swim and 42 in a 2,200 lake swim. But then again I didn't go totally nuts and blow out on the swim, because there was a 90k bike and a half marathon to do afterwards.