You know, swimming has to be one of the slowest forms of personal transport available. I could run 1100M in, well, considerably under five minutes. Swimming it last night took me over an hour, with lots of stopping. But I did it. My goal was to do at least 1km, so I’m very happy that I got over that mark.

I met up with Marcus and we went to a pool near his house at around 7pm. Unlike Big Stacy there was a $5 entry fee, but the lanes were huge and empty so I wasn’t complaining. Indeed, I spent most of the evening without having to share a lane at all. It was a 25m pool, and we did the first 200m or so one length at a time. Once we got a bit more comfortable we started doing 50m a time, and I know I was getting sloppy about 35-40m into each lap. My breathing got ragged and my stroke got very messy.

I also know from my experience with AustinFit that this is normal, that benefits will come quickly with persistence, and that there’s no substitute for just getting out there and putting in the time.

At around 750m we stopped and had a little break. Well, we’d been resting for a minute or two every 50m, but we had a good conversation at this point about the fact that we’d hit the mark for the sprint distance triathalon. Not all at once, of course, but its still a good point to get to. I think we’re both going to sign up for the CapTex tri next spring, hopefully at the Olympic distance but at least at the Sprint.

Once we reached that distance I did a lap of breaststroke (slow and hard) followed by a lap of backstroke (slow and easy), then got ready to go back to freestyle for the remainder. That’s when Marcus mentioned that we only had three more laps to go to hit our goal. Hmm.

I did one lap, then decided to try to do the distance in two cycles rather than three and turned back for another length. When I got to the end I was still doing alright - or at least I wasn’t doing any worse than I had been - so I turned back again. I wasn’t flip turning, and in fact was getting a brief hold and push off every time, but didn’t spend more than 2-3 seconds at each end. That’s two laps out of the three taken care of so, of course, I had to try to knock out the remainder.

I ended up doing five laps, 250m, without taking a break, extending out beyond our 1000m goal to hit the 1100 point. I was told that my form went really bad on the last couple, and I know I was having a hard time keeping my body up and was angling my legs down too much, but I’d finally settled into a stroke/breathing pattern and I didn’t want to lose it. I couldn’t help but think of the number of times that Gilbert’s told us that going when we’re tired can be some of the best training time we get as far as pushing our bodies to adapt.

So that was it. My first swim over 1km, and it wasn’t too terribly difficult, just time consuming. I’m already looking forward to next week’s outing, whenever that happens. I’ll probably go for around 1km again but try to improve my form and do more consistent multi-lap periods. Swimming may be very different than running and biking, but I know I can figure it out.

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