Fishy Fishy

This morning as I was walking out the door at 5:30 Marty said, “You are going to hate the workout.” Just what you want to hear, bleary-eyed on your way to the pool! It’s a good thing Marty never tells me the workout beforehand. I hear it the same as everyone else, on the wall right before we set off.

For the past 2 months I have been swimming very sporadically. It’s the off season and I was letting myself sleep in if I wanted to. In October I had several weeks of zero swimming, but that slowly moved to at least once a week and in November I even had a few twice a weeks in there. December 1 was my date to get back into a training groove instead of the whatever-I-feel-like groove I had been in. So in the water with everyone else, Marty announces the set after some warmup/drills/builds: “1,000 for time.” I think all of us thought we had misheard him…what?! “Yup, 1,000 for time,” then he went into an explanation of why this is a good benchmark set while we all hung on the wall trying to quickly wrap our minds around it.

Anyways, I had no idea what I could do with my recent lack of swimming, but realized my swim has improved over the year so hopefully some of that fitness still remained. Off I went, was able to keep count, and touched the wall in 13:30 after a solid but not all out effort. It took me about a 25 easy after to calculate what that pace was per 100 (my brain was a bit fuzzy - 1:21) and when I realized, I was stoked! I didn’t do a 1,000 test set last year but I would bet money that it would not have been 1:21 pace at this point in time. It’s fun to see improvement! After the 1,000 we then did some 400’s descending – tough workout this morning!

After work I’m planning on running for the first time in several weeks. Just 20min, but I’m excited to get back out there. I’m ready to start training again and looking forward to next year’s races.

I had to do a little editing on the comic below - erase the cigarette because of course Marty doesn't smoke. Also, Marty is much more fit than this guy, but this is what he does when we don't get in quick enough. Just kidding :)