I got in the pool at 5:40am.  It has been pretty windy here for the past couple weeks and, as a consequence there was a lot of leaves in the pool.  While the pool is outdoors, it is bordered by very high walls.  However, the leaves still found their way into the pool.  This particular YMCA maintains the pool  extremely well so I was surprised to see all the debris.  It wasn’t real bad, just a few leaves here and there.  I am sure it will be cleaned up pretty fast.  Ok, so much for my morning rant about the pool.

Today I laid down 2200 yards… 1 x 100, 2 x 1000, 1 x 100.

During the second 1000 yard interval I notice that the guy in the next lane was swimming shoulder to shoulder with me.  He was one of those dudes who could do flip turns.  I swear he was trying to race me.  We would hit the wall at the same time and of course he would get in front of me on the flip turns.  I noticed, however, that I would catch him on the way to the wall.  So after a few laps I thought I would crank it up to see if I could stay far enough in front of him that I could come off the wall before he did his flip turn.  When I began to go faster he went faster so I knew that it was game on.  After a few hundred yards I got out way in front of him and until there was a point where I was about 2/3s of a pool length in front.  At that point he backed off.  I was pretty happy about that because I was getting tired trying to maintain the speed. I am slow so I feel sorry for the guy.  Usually anyone who can do flip turns intimidates me a bit.

When I got out of the pool, Keiko (the lifeguard) says, “short swim today”.  I almost fell over, thanks Keiko.  Man, talk about deflating one’s ego.

I was taking a look at some swimming workouts on the web last night and they can get real confusing.  They talk about doing kick drills, pull drills, descending laps, blah blah blah.  I admit that I don’t know what the heck it all means.  So I just jump in and swim.  Another thing I notice is that they talk about doing 1:30 / 100s for the drills.  Cough, cough…. what!  When I crank it up I can only muster around 1:50 for about 300 – 500 yards (although today during my imaginary race with “dude” I managed to pull a 1:45 during one of the laps).  Most competitive swimmers do sub-minute / 100.   After the stupid “race” my pace fell between 1:58 – 2:05.  At that point I was just working technique.  A lot of competitive swimmers are doing sub one minute 100s in the pool.  I wonder what a “fast” triathlete does in the open water.  At any rate, I have a lot of work to do just to get at a good base level.  I think I need to change my handle to “Boomer the Slug”!  According to my training schedule, I am done with swimming for the week, however, I will be doing another session so I think I will do some short distance speed drills just to see if I can do something about my speed.

For some reason I have been really enjoying the swim sessions.  So I’ve have been cruising around YouTube looking for ways to improve.  Here is an interesting video of freestyle stroke drills.