Flashes of Panic

This morning I swam with one of my brother’s workout groups. (This is the team I’m registered with, but I’ve never met more than three or four of them before; one is required to be registered with a club to compete in many Masters events, particularly New Englands, and I can claim more association with them than with most clubs closer to either Amherst or Medford.)

Swimming with a group is both easier and harder than I expected. I am not the slowest one in the pool by any stretch (though I suspect that my brother and I were at the young end of the group, which tips that scale a bit.) I can keep up—but I can’t sustain the pace as long. We closed the workout with a set which involved swimming 50y free repeats, reducing the time by a second with each repeat until recovery time vanished.

(An extended aside: Swimmers, unlike runners, will do a set “on X” where X includes both the interval and recovery. A set “on 60” means a new swim starts every time the second hand makes a full lap of the clock, and a set “on 2:30” starts a new swim every two and a half minutes, regardless of how long the last swim took. A runner who reported doing 800m repeats “on 2:30” would mean they had run each 800m in two and a half minutes; they have said nothing about their recovery time.)

The first trick of this set is simply figuring out when to start; the math is more challenging than any single swim. Roughly, the first and second swims start on 60 (60s for the first cycle,) the second on 59, then 57, 54, 50, 45, 39, 32, 24, 15, 05, 54, 42… some time around here, I arrived at the wall after everyone else had left, so the workout was over for me; it was two or three more repeats before everyone else fell off.

In an earlier set, I discovered that my backstroke still has issues, and my fly is downright dysfunctional. But that comes as no surprise.

(This is also the place with the optimistic scale. It told me I am nearly half a cat lighter than last time. That may have something to do with weighing in before breakfast, of course.)

Now Playing: Tracks from Under The Big Top by Rosemary Caine