Flashes of Panic

There aren’t many days left in January, but I’d been having a hard time coordinating the pool schedule and a lap counter to get in for the one hour postal swim. We finally went in last night, and even so it took several minutes to sort out a lane—there are very few lap-swim times where there’s an available lane at the University pool.

So I was cold and in a hurry to get going once I got in the pool. As a result, I didn’t take the extra minute or two to loosen up the goggles I was wearing, not my usual pair. They were too tight, and while the good side of that is a nice, dry seal, the down side is that after twenty minutes or so you really want the damn things off your face.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the swim itself; for me, it was just a lot of swish and splash, since I could neither see nor hear much of anything happening above the surface of the pool. I focused on staying relaxed from the beginning, and possibly as a result, I felt like my form didn’t break down much in the course of the hour. I was trying to get a long glide off the wall from each turn and keep my stroke smooth.

Comparing my splits with last year, I was out ahead from very early on, starting with the 7:05.7 first 500y and right up through 3,000y (43:36.6, nearly 45 seconds and, at the pace I was swimming then, a full lap ahead of last year.) However, my “fourth thousand” push wasn’t really there; I thought I was working harder, but maybe the combination of fatigue and pushing made my form break down and my work less effective. I haven’t broken down the splits closely enough to find out where I was slipping, but I wound up with a total of 4,120y—4,100 plus not-quite-another. (The pool has five-yard increments marked on the wall, and swim rules allow you to measure that closely.) So I almost squeezed in another lap, but not quite.

Oddly enough, I consider this an improvement. It means that, over eighty laps, I was averaging nearly a half second faster per lap, which is not insignificant. Also, the opening 1,000y of 14:22.56 while swimming easily is a confidence booster about what I could do if I was pushing over that distance. Plus, swimming for an hour makes a measly 1,000y race look short.

And I got to take the goggles off at the end. That felt better than stopping did.

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