Well the crunch is on for IMC. I received my next training block from my coach...and to be honest...it's friggin scary!! No worries, I can do this, right???!!!!
Today was day one of said scary block. I had to swim 7 sets of 400 m. The fun part was to time the first 400 m, add a minute, and this was the time I was to be under for every set. Any extra time I was under would be my rest. Now this is all fine and dandy in theory....but in practice, well that's another story.
I kind of saw my time when I started the first set, so had an idea of how fast I needed to be. (The trick here of course is not to go out TOO fast in the first set, after all there are six more to follow!) The next few sets went fairly smoothly, I was close to time and had a bit of a rest. The last few; however, were a little confusing....
As anyone who has done laps knows, your mind can tend to wander. Afterall, it gets pretty tedious going back and forth and back and forth. I can't even do a flip turn so my momentum breaks every 25 m. (I really must learn how to do those!) Anyways, I tried really hard to focus on my technique, per Joe Friels advice in 'Going Long'. However, this is me we are talking about here and my mind goes off in all directions at all times, so the task of focusing on my technique would last approximately 12.5 m each lap, then I'd focus on trying to count which lap it was so I wouldn't forget. 1, 1, 1, 1 and 2, 2, 2, 2. Then my mind would wander again onto what I had to do at work, my heat score of a car, etc etc. You get the picture.
All was going fairly well till about the third set when I was at about lap 10, or was it 12? No worries, we'll start at 10 as I don't want to skimp on the laps. Of course, the same thing happened in the fifth set and pretty much every set I did after that, haha. I was looking at my time on the clock too, and it appeared I was taking longer. Hmm... This would imply that I did do an extra 50 metres, right? Or maybe I'm slowing down cause I was trying to swim hard so I could stay under the inital time that I'm now getting more tired??? Damn I hate these timed sets!!! So for now it will remain a mystery as to how many laps I actually did.
I can honestly say though that the end result was that I did at least 2800 m.....or more, and I was definately tired afterwards. My arms actually hurt, which is a good thing because at least with all the miscounts etc. I know I worked hard!
On to the next day of the killer block!
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