BIKE Just over 3hrs, just a squeak under 50 miles
SWIM one hour and 2500 yards, 30x50 as hard/easy
More MCTs today. And as much as I love them, as much purpose as they can serve on a bad weather day or a bad mood one, I have to quit riding them. Their sense of security is a nice draw--so few cars. The flat smooth surface is like running on a track--easy to measure for uninterupted intervals. But--they aren't really good for learning to ride on the roads a race will be held on.
But I had a schedule to stick to and only needed to get time on the bike with a few intervals, and this worked. I joined RM and AM at sun-up and we took off. RM had intervals to do, then AM and I did intervals on my favorite little "sprint spur". We got to see aid stations for a 10K that morning, saw deer and turtles, and had a very enjoyable ride!
My intervals on the sprint spur were pushed to max with a jackrabbit type start but I would fade towards the end. My muscular endurance is low, so that is a weakness to work on. I see improvement though in my sub-racepace super-conversational pace effort though, but they need to be lengthened to be of any use in a 70.3 distance.
After this I went to work, fueled by my new sweet potato cookie dough recovery recipe meal. It probably sounds awful, but it's really good and easy to eat while driving. The bike was pretty easy compared to the swim I had planned, so I needed to be refueled.
WU 4x200 as swim-kick-pull-dolphin. MS 30x50 as hard/easy (10s). CD 200 choice.
30x50 hard/easy sounds so much better when viewed as 15x50 hard efforts. See? Isn't that much easier looking?! So that's how I viewed it. I started off with no time goal, but after I saw that my first hard 50 was 50s, I got pretty jazzed about that! I had to look back to see what last year's 50's were timed at. The same! So that became my goal--50 second 50's, with the 50 easy being as easy as I wanted it to be.
Up to the last 5 or so intervals, I had the lane to myself. Towards the end a woman started assembling her pile of gear at the shallow end. I paused in one of my easy 50's to say "hi". She avoided eye contact. I waited. She avoided. WTH? I lifted my goggles and waited a few more seconds. She was doing up her hair into this high-headed bun. A bun under a swim cap? She had a little mini bottle of water next to a pile of paddles and fins. All I wanted to say was "hi, happy to split the lane?" and....nothing!! WTF?! Fine, bitch.
I'd like to think I was mature about this, but I wasn't. I pushed off the wall with only one thought: She had better not be able to swim faster than me. Oh holy hell the woman with done-up hair had better not be faster than me. Anyone with only a mini-sippy bottle of water can't be serious, right?
Oh yeah. Maturity. The textbook definition. I should come up with a word to describe this.....
Anyhoo, back to my sets. I was doing the hard sets as hard, maybe even sprint speed? I hit the 50y mark huffing and hanging on the wall, barely able to count to ten. But seeing the 50, 52, 53, 51 second times kept me fueled. My arms were starting to burn, but I noticed something surprising in this--my form is BETTER at this pace?! I had a long reach, a higher turn-over, a solid grab on the water. In an easy set my hands seemed to slip through the water more. I didn't time the difference between the hard and easy, but I'm going to guess about 10 seconds. 10 seconds is a lot of time! But I couldn't sustain this effort much more than 50 yards. I need to think about how to extend this.
Meanwhile bunny woman was finning along with me, and since she was using her fins I didn't take her pace seriously. But she was popping off flip-turns smooth and easy, a contrast to my quick but personally invented tumble turns. Hmmm.... Then she started swimming (not sure about fins but maybe with paddles) and seemed to be easily keeping up with my pace. My hard intervals pace, that is. Here I'm huffin and puffin to hold what she made look easy. Dammit!
I had a few moments of "oh give up and just slow down, you look like a fool" compared to a few moments of "NFW is she going to beat me to the wall" and a few "hey haha I'm benefiting from her draft". Maturity.
Then during an easy set I noticed a guy wearing mid-thigh swim jammers warming up for the next lane over. My was doing these arm-spinny dynamic warmups, beating his arms around and looking like he could injure himself. I think I saw Michael Phelps doing something similar. Did this guy think he was like MP? Oh man, he better not swim faster than me...
And sure a shit, it seemed he could swim faster than me. So now bunny woman and MPguy were making it look so damned easy...
Until I came up to the deep end at the end of a hard interval, and a woman in the rec area near me asked about my swimming. Turns out she had taken her first swim lesson yesterday!!! And was at the pool today to work on kicking while floating on her back. She said it felt like she was sinking at her feet. I said that's normal, and gave her two ideas of what I did to remedy that. She was determined to learn to swim by the end of the summer, and was excited about this new-to-her sport.
Why couldn't I be sharing a lane with her? Why do I get bunny woman?
Because bunny woman makes me a better swimmer. I'm not a terribly competitive person, but situations like this bring it out. Even if I keep it to myself and don't go open with it, I still feel that burn to get better and improve, even at the cost of my own sanity sometimes.
And that's what I love about this--I may hate swimming but damn I love the challenge of not being able to do it at the same time.
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