Alex's swim journal

Following the drylands session yesterday I did some Yoga this morning and felt pretty good, but my core was good and sore. Also my shoulders, mostly on the back were pretty tight. I was determined to do a long workout with short rests today, however, since looking over my workouts for the last couple f weeks I'm noticing that I'm putting in a lot less yardage per session in January than I was in December. I know part of that is working the strokes, which tires me out a lot faster than working strictly freestyle and drill (cf. my "strokework is killing me..." blog entry from last week); muscle endurance is definitely stroke specific.

So I planned 5000, and only got to 4200 before I decided the best thing was to stop rather than go on and maybe hurt myself. Here's what I did:

WARM-UP:
400 swim on 7:30 (6:43, all fr)
4 x 100 pull/fr on 1:50 (all around 1:29-1:30)
4 x 50 on 1:00 (all in :40)

MAIN:
10 x 100 on 1:45 alt. hard fr/EZ pull (1:23-1:27 for the hard; 1:33-1:42 for EZ pull)
4 x 250 on 4:30 (200 free hard + 50 Bk EZ; 200s were 3:05-3:15)
4 x 250 on 5:00 (200 Bk + 50 fr EZ; these were torturous and came in around 4:50)
3 minutes rest

COOL-DOWN:
200 EZ fr in 3:23
--
4200 SCY/85 minutes

The original plan was to do 5 x 200 IM after the 250s, but I bagged that b/c my legs felt like rocks and my shoulders were screaming for a break.

My hope is that I'll be able to revisit this workout in a couple of weeks and finish it much stronger... once my body adapts to the dry land conditioning a little more and I build my endurance in the other strokes. I have to keep reminding myself that I really am in good shape (my weight is under control and my resting HR is still in the mid 40s after all these years), but every sport and every event has its own demands that don't necessarily translate right away into the "new"... got to give myself that adaptation period! But right now I feel like maybe I should take up napping and soaking in hot-tubs for my next competitive sports!