Alex's swim journal

Forgot to mention in yesterday's blog entry, which I scribbled off pretty quickly to head out with the family for a couple of hours of errands and eating (I pigged out pretty good after the 6000-yard workout!), that among the other things I accomplished yesterday I swam a PR in the 200 back: 3:23-3:24. My previous best in practice was 3:29, and the seed time I put down for the next meet is 3:30. I've never done the 200 Back in a meet, so I'm anxious to see how that comes out... now that I'm focusing on the other strokes a little more this year, I'm besting my PRs in practice pretty regularly, so they are sometimes outpacing the seed times I have to send in a week and a half in advance. The biggest worry for me is the fact that the 200 back comes only two events after the 400 IM. My PR in 400 IM is 6:59, set a few weeks ago and I haven't tried swimming an "all-out" 4IM in a while... that's one of those events I feel like I'm "just barely surviving" anyway... swimming "all out" just means I push hard in the final 100 free, while most of the time in practice that 100 free ends up being like a recovery swim; but as my strokes get a little better I'd like to see the times come down.

Here are my events and seed times for Whitefish Bay Masters meet next Sunday:
400 IM--7:00
200 Back--3:30
200 Free--2:50
200 IM--3:20
200 Breast--3:40

I feel pretty confident about these seed times, I've already mentioned where I am in 200 back and 400 IM in practice; the 200 free is overly conservative--I've hit low 2:40s at the end of a set of 200s recently and my 200 split in my 500 meet swim was 2:53--but I'm going to "relax" on this swim, since it is only two events after the 200 back, and I still want to have something for the 200 IM. 3:21 seems to be my default time for a hard 200 IM in a normal practice and I hit 3:21 the first time I did 200 IM in a meet two weeks ago (even as disastrous as that swim was: banging walls, mis-timed turns, bouncing off the bottom, etc.), so I fell pretty confident about the possibility of PB-ing that and breaking into the mid- to upper-3:10s if everything goes smoothly. I swam one of my reps yesterday within 3-4 secs (3:43-3:44) of my 200 breast seed time (3:40). That is not a focus event for me--it will be the final event of the meet for me and I'm going to be fairly relaxed about it--but going off the blocks and hopefully having some other folks around me with similar seed times should push me to 3:40 in that. In any event, after next weekend I'll have some good baseline data to work from when submitting seed times for these events in future meets.

Today I did a really quick 2050-yard workout; mostly either relaxed swimming, drill, or kick (legs loosening up, but still pretty spent from last week's work)... an EZ day on the shoulders. That left shoulder was a little stiff going in but loosened up nicely and felt great at the end of the workout, even after a 50 sprint off the blocks.

200 free EZ
200 pull
100 in fr kick drills
200 pull
200 free
100 dolphins front and back
200 breast kick w/ board
50 back kick
200 breast kick w/ boards
50 streamline 3-2-1 breast kick
100 back dolphins
4 x 100 alt. free and pull
masters minute
50 fast free off the blocks: 31-32 secs (w/in 1 sec of my PR)