Flashes of Panic

Symptoms of a lasting problem

I was in no kind of shape to swim at New Englands this weekend, but I find that I’m watching the results with interest. I don’t always understand the times, but knowing the faces that go with some of the names helps a great deal.

And I still find cool stuff. For example, if you look at the 400y MR results from late yesterday, you’ll find, in the 25+ age group, a team which is evidently made up of one family, two generations: two men at 51 and 53, and two more at 23 and 25.

And you can find that my team set at least two New England records, one being my brother’s relay. (Two and a half seconds off the old mark.)

The team is 4.5 points ahead after the second of four days of competition, defending the title we won last year. That’s not a very big margin when the point totals are already in excess of 1,500. In the overall rankings, I found that the Austrian Swimming Federation (AUT) has 18 points.

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Technorati Tags: Maine, New England, relay, swimming

Posted by pjm at 8:43 AM | Comments (0)

I'm definitely not in shape for that

I got a phone call last night from a Maine number I didn’t recognize.

It turned out to be one of my relay teammates from last year’s record-setting performances. He was scraping around trying to put together relays for this year’s meet, and wanted me to swim a backstroke leg on a medley relay. I laughed for a bit, and then (once I figured out he wasn’t really joking) pointed out that the last time I had, in fact, been in a pool swimming laps was also the last time I’d done the backstroke leg in an MR, and I’d considered it a minor miracle that I didn’t disqualify the whole team for illegal turns.

So not only was he asking me to swim my worst stroke, but I’m not in shape to swim any stroke at all, right now; I’ve been running too much.

I feel a bit bad about it, because I know it would be fun. But I really couldn’t get ready that fast.

Now Playing: Waco Lake from Abigail by The Nields

Posted by pjm at 10:45 PM | Comments (4)

I'm getting too old for this

Three-day meets, I mean. Four-day, counting last weekend.

• Races: 10, 5 individual and 5 relays.
• Yards raced: 2350, 1850 in individual events and 500 in relays.
• Yards in warm-up or cool-down: Well in excess of 3,000, I’d guess.
• Points scored: 19 by myself, plus part of relays scoring 66 more.
• Points by which we beat the next team in our division: 1849.5
• Hours spent at the Harvard pool: I prefer not to think about it, but on Saturday alone, at least ten.
• Strokes swum in competition: three.
• Years since I had last done a backstroke start from the blocks: 16.
• Individual races where I beat my best previous time for that yards distance: 5.
• Races where I nonetheless didn’t beat the time predicted by my meters time last December: 1.
• Times I haven’t yet listed, because I will inevitably come back to this entry someday to see how fast I was:
• • 50y BR: 37.09

• • 200y FR: 2:22.67
• • 500y FR: 6:33.45
• 20 oz. bottles of Gatorade consumed: 3.
• Tubs of Gatorade powder used in multiple refills of those 20 oz. bottles: 2/3.
• Chocolate chocolate chip cookies consumed: I lost count.
• Blade shaves: 2
• Alumni of The College present for a group photo: 8, plus one parent. (Oldest, class of ‘59; youngest, ‘02; one other from my class present on Saturday, but not on Sunday for the photo.)
• Alumni of my high school swim team present and swimming: At least four, starting in the 50+ age group. One other spotted in December but not here this weekend.
• Relays disqualified (“Deeked,” an abbreviation for “DQ”) by those alumni on Friday night: 2. (My brother blames his club coach, who said, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”)
• Number of chances I had to deek a third relay today with illegal backstroke turns: 3. Illegal turns: 0.
• Number of heats by which the field size for the men’s 100y IM exceeded the men’s 100y FR: 3.
• Number of swimmers claimed for the whole meet: 850.
• Number of masters swim meets in the world larger than this one: 2.

Technorati Tags: Boston, New England, race, relay, swimming

Posted by pjm at 10:21 PM | Comments (3)

1:02.40

I think that’s a PR. Certainly it’s the fastest I’ve done a 100y free in this particular swimming career; maybe I was faster in high school, but I don’t remember it. I’m getting used to not being last, but I hadn’t expected to score age group points (four) in this event, which had 25(!!) heats of eight swimmers.

It’s gotta be the cap. (Yes, that’s a blue lobster.) I pulled it on for the first time right before the race, sealed it over my un-hydrodynamic ears, and off we went.

I had a 28-second relay leg, too; it was a mixed relay, so we scored 24 points just because there weren’t many teams contending. We’re currently standing fourth overall for points, and leading our division.

Technorati Tags: race, relay, swimming

Posted by pjm at 9:52 PM | Comments (0)

Relay time

The team is getting wound up for next weekend’s meet. After distance day we lead club scoring by 25 points. (A curious quirk of the way U.S. Masters Swimming is subdivided is that “New England Masters” is its own massive club, with an internal “workout group” competition; everyone outside “New England,” which includes Connecticut, Maine, and at least one New Hampshire club, competes with each other.) I gather that there are more swimmers coming down for this meet than we’ve sent for years, and since masters swimming scoring rewards a lot of “splashes” as much as quality performances, high turnout is the first step to a winning score total.

Today we got proposed relay lineups. I’m in a mixed sprint relay on Friday night, and alternate for two more on Saturday. Unlike the meters meet in December, relay age groups here are not based on the sum of ages, but instead are determined by the age of the youngest swimmer in your relay. The trick is to assemble the youngest relay you can while staying above a particular age-group break point. If you’re 70, you can swim on any relay; if you’re my age, you can only swim on 18+ or 25+ relays.

It felt a little to me as though the lineups were drawn by a score-optimizing algorithm, though, the sort of program that never rests its key players. I wonder if I won’t wind up swimming at least one of my “alternate” slots on Saturday, and maybe picking up another one on Sunday, when the all-stars start wearing out.

Update, 3/21: Plenty of people, apparently, were unhappy with yesterday’s draft. Another round came out today; among other changes, I was promoted from alternate on the short MR. The wording of this email implies that while there are 40 relays proposed, they expect as much as 25% “shrinkage.” I expect there will be a lot of relay re-alignment on deck this weekend.

Now Playing: Fists In My Pockets from (Places) by The Shiftless Rounders

Technorati Tags: race, relay, swimming

Posted by pjm at 9:40 PM | Comments (0)

13:26.28

While I was counting laps for my brother, I mentioned to a high school teammate of ours (who wound up ahead of me in our later event by about a minute and forty seconds) that he was going back to Maine before my race, and I wasn’t sure who was counting for me.

My brother had apparently mentioned this to others as well, because in the half hour before my race, both Jon and a Maine Masters teammate, Bill (second in the 70-plus age group) asked me where I liked the lane counter—of course they were counting laps for me! Bill agreed to check and see if Jon was there, and then said he would return to the start side and watch from there.

So I did my twenty laps—not many of them under 40 seconds, I’m afraid, but actually a much more consistent pace than I felt like I was managing—feeling like I was being passed back and forth between Jon and Bill, checking in every twenty-five yards for a shot of encouragement.

I didn’t actually see either of them, just the numbers Jon would stick under the surface counting off the lengths; nor did I hear them much. I saw the swimmers on either side of me, the one on the outside who wanted to go under 13:00 and crept away from me after the first 300 or so, only to turn up in passing range with 100 remaining (I caught him,) and the one on the inside who zipped my suit up before the race and probably beat me by a length. (We unzipped each other once we emerged on deck.) I heard the swoosh and rumble of the water and my own motion in it, the bubbles and gasps of my breathing, and that was pretty much it.

The time is pretty good. It’s 23 seconds better than my best, the only other time I’d raced this distance, and it should move me to fifth on the club list for the age group, which I’m pleased with. I’m not sure, but I think the first half was the fastest 500y I’ve ever done; that’s likely to change next weekend. Both halves were faster than my 500y from my first New Englands three years ago. I also didn’t finish last in my age group; there was another swimmer, probably in my heat, who finished about five seconds behind me.

I scored ten points for the team, not as many as some people who made the wet and slippery trip in today, but probably my favorite reward for the work.

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Posted by pjm at 7:20 PM | Comments (0)

Splashy day

There are, perhaps, eight inches of wet, wet snow out there. (I haven’t measured, and it drifted a lot out here.) But the meet website says we are on as scheduled. Twenty laps at 39.5s per lap is my task.

Technorati Tags: Boston, snow, swimming

Posted by pjm at 7:43 AM | Comments (0)

Terms which have dramatically different meanings depending on which of my interests is involved

“Race conditions.”

Posted by pjm at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)

Master of none

Since I set my goal in January, I’ve been splitting time between running and swimming. I think the official evaluation is that I’m in decent shape overall, but not terribly good at either sport right now.

I’m running around 30 miles per week, generally off four runs a week. Usually one of those is a long run (10-12 miles is “long” at this point), one is speedwork, and the other two are usually just easy jogs, but last week one included hill repeats.

The other three (or four) days I’m in the pool. I’ve discovered that the day after a long run I don’t have a lot of pop in my kick, and I wonder if my total lack of zero-exercise days might not be wearing me out a bit. I’m scaling back some this week, because Saturday is goal-race day: one thousand yards in the pool. If I don’t have the endurance now, there’s not much I can do about it; I’m just doing fin swims and short sprints and hoping I can sustain a good pace all the way through.

Maybe swimming in my brother’s old Powerskin suit instead of the nylon-mesh drag suit I’ve been training in will give me the same feeling as switching from regular running shoes into spikes? I can always hope.

Now Playing: This Is It (Acoustic Version) by Ryan Adams

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Posted by pjm at 9:31 PM | Comments (0)

Well said, sir

I don’t think this requires further comment:

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Posted by pjm at 2:01 PM | Comments (0)

It continues

Oh, this cartoonist has been where I’ve been…

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Technorati Tags: comics, swimming

Posted by pjm at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

Abject humiliation

What else would you call it when you get smoked by people twice your age?

(I’m sure this strip will vanish in a few weeks…)

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Technorati Tags: comics, swimming

Posted by pjm at 9:01 PM | Comments (0)

Toughen up

One of the bright ideas my brother had for this swim meet was the “toughen up challenge.” Last year, this was essentially a sprint meet—I think they called it “the churn”—with all 100s and 50s. This year, he introduced two five-event series: 200y in each stroke, plus a 400 IM, or 50y in each stroke, plus a 100 IM. In each event, times were age-graded (according to the world records in each age group, apparently, but age-grading is a black art to me) and summed. Lowest resulting time wins.

Of the 78 people who entered (nearly 40 deck entries! No wonder we were busy at the start of the meet,) almost half entered one of the challenges. As a result, we had some event imbalances. It’s not unusual to have three or five heats of a 50y race; it is unusual to have four heats of the 200y butterfly.

I had fun with the meet manager software generating the heat sheets, results, etc. This is the same package used for many track meets, and the same one I used for the Amherst Invitational, and there are a number of good reasons. It slurps up results directly from the timing system, it understands all the age groups and paper needed, and it “sanity checks” numbers (if you try to seed someone for one event using a time from another one, e.g. a 50y event using a 200y time, it catches your oversight almost before you do.) There are a lot of annoying UI quirks—a lot of menu items don’t produce menus, but act like buttons, for example, and lots of windows “lock out” other windows until they’re closed—but the things it gets right make people willing to tolerate the quirks.

Swimming has advantages and disadvantages over track racing. One advantage is lap counting; with touch pads at the end of the pool, not only do swimmers get lap times to the 100th of a second, but the timer can see how many laps they have completed and how many are remaining. (The timing system knows the event distance and shows a lap countdown for each lane.) The timer just has to keep an eye on the swimmers to see who misses the pad, which happens sometimes in events with open turns. This can’t be done on the track; you can’t use the camera to clock every lap.

The disadvantage comes from the need to line up every swimmer with a heat and a lane. If someone leaves the meet early, or if you don’t have the time and personnel to enforce positive check-in, you have to re-seed the entire meet if you want to avoid leaving empty lanes for every event that swimmer entered. And re-seeding means everyone who is there gets confused about which heat and lane they’re actually competing in; unlike on the track, the officials don’t take responsibility for getting athletes properly set up for each heat. (There aren’t enough officials.) Swimmers are expected to know their lane and heat, and be there ready to compete, and re-seeds make this difficult for them… so even though we were using seven lanes (with the eighth reserved for warm-up) we had some heats go off with only four swimmers. We probably swam three or four more heats than were needed, just because we couldn’t re-seed to account for no-shows and scratches.

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Posted by pjm at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

29.41 and 1:05.02

I scored a swim meet yesterday. I’ll write a bit more about that experience later, if I can organize the observations into something worth reading. (I have a love-hate relationship with Meet Manager.) This is about the swimming part.

I meant to swim the 200y free, but the combination of a nasty cold this week (my third in six months, which I’m really unhappy about,) and a plethora of deck entries (72 entered swimmers, a pretty big crowd) led me to scratch out of that event, which was early on the program, and go for the 50y/100y option instead. After all, if breathing deeply makes me cough, why shouldn’t the solution be entering races which don’t require breathing?

That was pretty much how the 50 went. I got a fair start (goggles on) kept my head down, kicked hard, and tried to bring on tunnel vision. It turned out to be a fairly effective mind set; 50y is credit-card spending, with the payment not due until well after the event is over. I’d say that the time was a PR, but I don’t think I’ve played at sprinting before so I think it’s my only time for the event anyway.

Another safe start in the 100y, and the published splits tell me I hit the first 50 of that one in 31.78—not too shabby. The most memorable part of that race was how little I had to think about what I was doing. I didn’t remind myself how to turn most effectively, how to kick, anything. I just got in and raced. What I remember was looking across the pool and trying to beat the people in the other lanes. (I did, too; I won heat 3, not that anyone’s counting.) 33.24 for the second half for a 1:05.02, just off the 1:04 which my brother reminded me I swam last year in Exeter. (How does he remember my times when I have to look them up?)

Then I hopped out and slithered over to the scoring table to announce the next heat while trying not to drip on anything significant and not to wheeze too audibly into the mike.

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Posted by pjm at 1:16 PM | Comments (0)

Crossing in the mail

I got email this morning (late last night, actually) from the NEM-SCY meet management, warning me that today is the last day for regular entry, and I should register online if I didn’t want to pay late entry fees.

I mailed my entry last week—Thursday, if I remember rightly, well before this Tuesday’s postmark deadline—and since it’s only traveling to Arlington, I expect it has been delivered by now. According to the website, they’ve only actually processed what they received as of a week and a half ago, and have “hundreds” of unopened entries. Who knows how many people like me are going to get that email, assume their entry has been lost in the mail, and re-enter online? I wonder if, by attempting to encourage pre-entry, the meet management has created a lot more duplicate-entry headaches for themselves.

Now Playing: What Do You Want Me To Do from Bring ‘Em All In by Mike Scott

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Posted by pjm at 2:40 PM | Comments (0)

We don't mess around

I was sealing up my hour swim entry and cast my eyes over the rules again. I noticed that since the race is open for the entire month of January, there is a provision for swimmers who change age groups (“age up”) during the race. Specifically, they are allowed to enter twice: if they swim twice, once in each age group.

Technorati Tags: postal, race, rules, swimming

Posted by pjm at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)

4120y

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.

Technorati Tags: postal, swimming, race

Posted by pjm at 3:41 PM | Comments (0)

Enough with the athletic metaphors

I am writing a homework assignment, and had to stop myself from labeling the questions “Warm up” and “Main set.”

Now Playing: Empty glass from I’m on my way by Rich Price

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Posted by pjm at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

Number Four

I have my goal for the spring.

When I was home last weekend, my brother spent some time skimming our swim club’s top ten lists to find out where I was ranked. I’m ranked in a bunch of short course meters events, just because SCM is sufficiently oddball in the northeast that the only meets are held in places like BU or Wheaton with a movable bulkhead allowing the pool to be configured for it. Except in the 100m BR (where I am the only club member of my age group ever to swim the event, and therefore hold the record,) I’m ranked third behind my brother and whatever club member held the record before he broke it.

In SCY, where there are a lot more meets and therefore more opportunities for other people to swim fast, I’m largely invisible. I’m ranked in exactly one event: the 1000y free from two years ago. My 13:49.18 ranks me 7th in the age group. What’s more, there are targets in front of me; it’s only 20 seconds to 5th, and about 38 to 4th. (There is then a gap of about two minutes to 3rd.)

I was thinking about those three marks in front of me yesterday while I was in the pool; I was also thinking about Amby’s plans to race the mile. I wasn’t very motivated for the set I was doing, a ladder I’ve done a dozen times before, but as I approached the “top” of the ladder I realized: this was easy. I was chewing up this workout in a way I never had before—maybe not in terms of absolute speed, but psychologically I felt charged up the way I seldom do in a swimming workout.

I’m signing up for the 1,000y at New Englands again this year (it will be March 17, which means my brother will have aged up and out of my age group. This opens up the possibility of some secondary goals.) I want to move up on that ranking. I’d like to be number four. That’s a lousy place for Olympics or Olympic Trials—Pre’s place from Munich, Don Kardong’s from Montreal—but I’m not swimming a kiloyard in the low 11s without performance enhancing drugs or flippers. Fourth will be fine: 20 laps in 39 seconds will get me there with room to spare.

Fifth wouldn’t be half bad, either. But I’m training for fourth.

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Posted by pjm at 9:28 PM | Comments (1)

Swimming with the champions

Why finish high school? So you, too, can go to the alumni swim meet and cheat like mad.

This was my second time at the meet as an alum, and no mention was made of the team’s status as defending state champions. Alumni were announced by name and class year, the list followed by, “and those guys are the swim team.”

Events are largely whimsical, and they’re all relays. What’s important here is that the alumni—including the coach—are aware of this, and do whatever necessary to stay more or less even or slightly ahead of the current team. Sometimes this isn’t necessary; some of us are still legitimately fast. Others… well, on at least one occasion, as I waited to tag off on a relay, the coach leaned over to me and said, “Go now, and dive under him.”

Posted by pjm at 9:52 PM | Comments (0)

Record setting performances

What fun is a record you didn’t know you held?

My brother did a little research and discovered that not only do I have a share of two club relay records from the other weekend, but in this race in 2005, I set the club’s 100m breaststroke record for the 30-34 AG. In other words, nobody from the club in that age group had ever entered the event before. (Nor has since, apparently.)

“Don’t get too excited,” he added. “Son ages up next year.”

Posted by pjm at 8:17 PM | Comments (0)

Scoring summary

The results from the swimming leg of this weekend’s competitions are posted. I actually managed to score more points for the team as an individual (18) than on relay teams (56/4=14) but a 32-point total is higher than I usually manage, and that’s all from the relays. The high point list shows that the four of us from the relays were 8th, 9th, 73rd and 132nd in point scoring; with 250 men on that list, I’m slightly behind halfway on the list. Together, we scored 340 points (plus a few more from the other three in a third relay) out of 1410 scored by our team. That only got us fourth; we beat Connecticut, but couldn’t take down two New York teams.

The 50m splits from my 400m swim are illuminating; if you ignore the first one (which includes a block start and is therefore artificially fast) there’s a little bell curve in there. I was telling Joe on Sunday evening that a 400m swim is not unlike a mile run, and my 100m (two-lap) splits show it; when I run a mile, the first lap is pretty quick, the second and third progressively slower, and I pick up for the fourth. The 200m looks pretty much the same, but on four laps instead of eight; I pretty much blew my chances of hitting my seed time in the third of four laps. Clearly, I need some endurance before I try to do multiple races in one day again.

Our club records for the 100-119 age group are 400m free relay, 4:35.65, and 200m free relay, 2:00.70. Unimpressive as those times may be, they’re probably not going anywhere until Zach can recruit some more fast young guys; we totaled 116 this year, so next year we’ll be too old.

Posted by pjm at 11:28 AM | Comments (1)

Another day, another record

Three races in the B.U. pool today. My brother loaned me his older “fastskin” suit, one of those full-body suits like the Olympians wear, and this was the first time I’d ever raced in something quite like that. After squeezing myself into it (since my brother is generally larger than me, I’m not sure how it got so tight,) I looked at the mirror and thought, I have really skinny legs.

(More after the jump.)

Technorati Tags: amherst, race, relay

Posted by pjm at 5:33 PM | Comments (0)

1:14

The funny thing about relays at Masters meets is that nobody wants to do them. The really good swimmers sign up for a full slate of individual events without considering the relays, and those more my speed figure we won’t be asked. So when it comes to meet day, nobody is ready to race, unless something was organized in advance. What’s more, with the relays usually coming at the end of the meet, a lot of swimmers just want to get dry and go home.

For me, the 400m free relay was all I was swimming today. I orbited the warmup pool while all three of my teammates did the 400m IM. They were plenty happy to have me, for two reasons: one, everyone on the “other” relay our team entered had opted out, so we were the only team entered. Two, the average age for the four of us put us in an age group where there is no club record for the event. As long as we got around without a DQ, we’d set the record, and next year this particular team will be too old to break it anyway.

They figured on going slowest to fastest. This also meant that IM swimmers got the most rest, since it meant I started. (My payoff was that I got a “legit” 100m time, since my split would be the only one from a legal start.) I got a fair start (i.e. my goggles stayed on) and pretty much just sprinted. I don’t remember feeling like the (meters) pool was any longer than the (yards) pool here at the University. Turns weren’t pretty, but I really did feel like I was moving quickly.

When I tapped the wall, I had to look up and figure out if leg two had actually left. He had. The others were telling me “1:14” before I could even get out of the pool. Leg two was swimming with a broken ankle; a 1:10 for him, I think, then 1:09 for leg 3 and 1:02 for the anchor, my brother. So we went about 4:35 (the results aren’t posted yet.)

I swam 1:14 last year, too, with (I think) better training. The calculator on the Great Bay Masters site suggests that’s worth a 1:06 in yards, which is about two seconds off my best.

They tell me they’re putting me on two relays tomorrow. There are 200m and 800m free relays and a 400m MR, so I assume they mean the 400m MR and the 200m free, but I’m swimming the open 400m and 200m so I may be a little wobbly when the second relay rolls around.

Posted by pjm at 9:23 PM | Comments (0)

10:25

Thinking back, before I started this morning’s race, I thought maybe I’d only run a flat 3,000m once, in 1994, on Williams’ grungy little nine-laps-per-mile track. I’m pretty sure I’ve never raced on a banked track, and it’s been at least ten years since I’ve raced indoors at all.

I didn’t leap to the front of my heat, but I didn’t exactly fall to the back, either. We spread out pretty quickly, and for the first two laps I pretty much just sat on the rail and tried to avoid being spiked while everyone determined to be in the front pack found their way around me. I heard “39” and “41” for the first two splits, but didn’t feel like I was working quite that hard.

Finally I was at the back of a definite pack, and I tried to make an effort to stay there. Around four laps in, that pack started to break up, and found myself trading the rail with someone coming up from behind. We passed the first K in 3:26, a shade faster than I’d expected but nothing I was going to turn down.

I think I fell asleep a bit in the second K. Not literally; I just wasn’t working on picking out targets and pushing myself. The laps were going by tolerably fast, nobody was passing me, and I felt like I could handle things, but in fact I was slowing down. 3:33 for the second K, with enough second fractions that the actual 2K time was 7:00. Time to get on the horse. It also helped that I was now catching and lapping runners who weren’t all that slow; after ten laps, you only need to be four or five seconds per lap slower for me to lap you.

I opened up my stride and started concentrating on form, pushing with my arms and getting a good kick off each stride. I could hear that I was pulling away from the people who had been right behind me for most of the second K, and I could also see that I was really blowing by people I was lapping. I finally got up and sprinted the last lap, covering the last K in 3:24 for a final time of 10:25 (splits don’t add up due to rounding.) It didn’t feel too bad; I think I’d do it again, particularly if I could get myself concentrating in the second K. I think I could probably slice at least ten seconds off that.

Just now I dragged out my old log books to see if I was right about how long it has been. Turns out I ran 3,000m four times, starting with that 9:53 at Williams (which followed a 4:29 1500m; I should have read the signs and figured out that the longer the race got, the better I’d do,) and the only time I was over 10:00 was when I’d run a mile (4:57) and 800m (2:20) first. My PR, only ten years old but 11 in February, was a 9:44 at Brown. I guess some things are better left to memory.

I’m due back at BU, this time at the pool, in a few hours. They didn’t need me for the medley relay, which was mid-meet, but they do want me for the 400m free relay this evening. It turns out the team doesn’t have a mark in the record books for that event for a team with average ages under 30; with my brother and two 25-year-olds, we’re going to set one up. It may be my only chance to set a swimming record…

Update, 12/17: Results are posted. Turns out I only ran 10:26?

Posted by pjm at 2:31 PM | Comments (1)

Executive summary

My brain is toast. I have about five posts I want to write, but they’re all too long.

• Finals: It’s all over but the gradin’. I’ve been neck-deep since Sunday night; I’m short on sleep and haven’t been to the grocery store for so long that scurvy is starting to be a legitimate concern. Today I shaved and got a haircut so I’d look a bit less like a shipwreck survivor.

• Academics: I am, based on what my professors, an average student at best, and my math background is deficient. (This is not news.) However, I am in great demand as a TA; Professor γ was counting on having me another semester, but apparently while Professor β doesn’t want me in her research group, she does want me as a TA… and the department chair thinks I’ll be most useful with neither of them. (It looks like I will be both TAing and doing a Masters’ project in the spring with yet another professor, who I’ve mentioned before but I will now officially dub Professor Σ for brevity.)

• Apparently the University has had some small national notoriety in the past few days due to some so-called satire published in the campus conservative rag which some think crossed the racism line. I haven’t read the inflammatory text in question, and I think while there’s nothing wrong with holding the responsible authors and editors up to the ridicule of the University community—or, at the very least, explaining why their biases are wrong rather than simply chastising them for holding them—I also think that multiple public responses from the President’s office both overstates the importance of the publication in question, and lowers the President’s office. The editors in question are in a hole; let ‘em figure out for themselves when to stop digging.

• Racing: I will be at BU all weekend. Saturday morning I’m running a 3,000m on the track (I need to get out my old college logs and see if I even have a PR at that distance) and apparently that afternoon I’ll be in a relay or two over at the pool. (My team is looking for a good finish at the SCM meet.) Sunday I’m swimming 400m and 200m free, and more relays if I can still stand on the blocks without shaking at that point. Word is there’s wireless in the pool, too!

Now Playing: Boat from Let’s Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later On Tonight by Marah

Technorati Tags: computer science, grades, gradschool, medford, newspaper, race, relay, running, teaching

Posted by pjm at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)

Long wait over

Fifteen years after I last hit the pool for my high school, they finally won the big one. The Press Herald calls it “three years of frustration,” but my brother’s note in his email was, “Try twenty-five years.” (The Times Record quotes the current coach, one of my brother’s former teammates, saying “This is a team 30 years in the making.”) It seemed like every year we were favored to run the table, and every year we fell short, almost Sox-like.

Now Playing: The Shore and Stars by Austin Hartley-Leonard

Posted by pjm at 10:12 PM | Comments (1)

Payoff

I decided on Friday night to do the mini-meet at Exeter this morning. I got up with the cat and got up there in good time, though my directions were faulty (I had directions to the campus, but not the pool.) This was a relatively small meet, though not as small as the one I did at Simon’s Rock last year, so I had no trouble getting registered and getting 800y or so of warm-up, including a bunch of starts, before they cleared the pool.

(Exhaustively boring report below…)

Posted by pjm at 5:15 PM | Comments (0)

Shopping

The problem with being in a city, where I could theoretically find anything, is that I don’t have the time to look for it.

However, I really need to track down my own swim cap if I intend to do any more races. I emailed my brother asking if he could loan me one for tomorrow’s “mini” meet in Exeter. I need to stop setting him up like this.

I think I have one you can borrow. You did the 5K postal swim, right?

Now Playing: Cherry Lane from Cold Roses by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

Posted by pjm at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

One Hour

I got my USMS membership card in yesterday’s mail, and today I swam my first competition of the year. I went over to the University pool and swam a distance for the One Hour Postal swim.

The One Hour is a regular January event in which, some time in the course of the month, you simply swim for one hour while some other brave soul watches and takes splits (every 50y.) Once finished, you fill out the entry form and mail it in. Someone in Ohio collates the entries and publishes the results in February.

A generously agreed to spend an hour of her time watching me go back and forth. I’ve never done such a long stretch of swimming without a break, so I was a bit apprehensive, but I figured as long as I didn’t get in over my head early on, I’d be fine. For a conservative goal, I worked out that one minute per 50y lap would be 3,000y total. I never thought through any more ambitious goals. I suited up with an older race suit and a cap (unusual for me,) figuring anything that saved energy early on would pay off later.

I planned to start out easy, but according to A’s split sheet, it took me about 500y (7:14.5) to settle down. From there on, the subtractive splits for each lap are almost monotonous: a long string of 44s, with an occasional 43 when I started thinking too much. I split 14:40.8 at 1,000y, 22:02.1 at 1,500y, and 29:26.6 at 2,000y, which is the first 45.

At 2,000y by my count, I figured (accurately, as it turned out,) that I must be at least halfway, if not well beyond. I made a deal with myself to hang on to a steady pace through 3,000y (again, by my count; I had no idea if I’d missed or skipped a lap somewhere.) At 3,000y, I could start pushing, because however bad it got, I wasn’t going to be going too much longer. I can see a series of slower laps in the third thousand, probably as a result of this. But once I reached 3,000y (44:20.7) I started cranking. I wasn’t sprinting, but I was making an effort to push the pace, which mostly meant thinking faster. The 45s and 44s became 44s and 43s, and I see a few 42s in there. From 3,000y to 3,500y was 7:08, which is pretty quick for me; I was 7:16 from 3,500y to 4,000y (58:44). If I’m reading the sheet correctly, those were the second and third fastest 500y segments. I got in one more lap under the hour, and another length (4075 in 59:52) but 4,100y was past the hour mark.

I’m pretty pleased with that distance; it’s not extraordinary, but it exceeded my modest expectations. I’m more pleased with the splits; being that steady for an hour, and that fast, says a lot for being able to hang on to a more aggressive pace through a 1,000y or 500y race come April.

It looks like I get to count the extra 25y, so my official distance will be 4,075y. If this year’s results are anything like last year’s, that will put me around 50th out of 90-odd in my age group. (It looks like my brother was 4th.)

Now, to finish filling out the entry for mailing in.

Now Playing: Silver Machine from A Box Of Birds by The Church

Posted by pjm at 4:09 PM | Comments (1)

Clinic

I spent this morning soaking in Blodgett Pool—actually, creeping back and forth across it, doing drills in a freestyle clinic put on by Cambridge Masters Swimming. My brother put me on to the clinic last month at the meet, and eventually just signed me up for it as a Christmas gift. (I wonder if my 100m thrashing might have prompted that.)

I’ve got a packet of material from the clinic that I should really go through, but this was probably the first time since I learned to swim that anyone has sent me back and forth across the pool with the sole purpose of seeing how I do it, and telling me how to do it better. We focused on body position and pull. I hold my head a whisker too high, which tips my feet down; that’s pretty easy to fix. Harder is my pull, though some of the body position drills (rolling from my hips) will help.

They had underwater and on-deck video cameras to tape us and show us our form, which is a very striking way of demonstrating what we’re doing. Seeing my left arm pulling wide to the outside without much angle to the elbow on the underwater camera is much more vivid than any demonstration: I don’t need much prompting to see what’s going wrong.

After about two hours in the water (much of it spent getting quite cold,) I did feel like I was faster—or, at least, like I could swim the same speed with less effort. It’s also clear to me that I will need to get in the pool on Monday and nail these things down before I forget them.

Given that I’m not swimming New Englands this year, I’ve spent some time over the last few days plotting what I will do instead. I’m hoping to do the hour swim sometime before classes start again, which means soon; I just need to make an appointment with my lap counter and screw my courage to the sticking point, or something like that. It looks like there’s a meet in southern New Hampshire sometime in February which may be interesting; they’ve got mostly short stuff on the schedule, but also a 1650y, “time permitting.” However, there are more meets in Maine than anywhere else in New England this winter, which is pretty pathetic when you consider where all the swimmers are actually located.

So I’m thinking seriously about making my goal meet the Colonies Zone SCY meet in April. It’s the weekend after the Boston Marathon, but it’s also going to require some travel: it’s being hosted by Patriot Masters at George Mason.

Now Playing: Angels Of The Silences from Recovering The Satellites by Counting Crows

Posted by pjm at 8:32 PM | Comments (0)

Cross-trained

There’s a picture of me in the current newsletter of my swim team. The online version is much clearer than the photocopy I got in the mail. The photo is from last month’s meet, and the part I find amusing is that both of us in the photo are wearing shirts from marathons. (Mine is from the NYCM; his is a bit more obvious.)

Posted by pjm at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

Chiller

Maybe I should’ve guessed something was up when I saw that the swim coach had his parka on. Turns out there was an issue with the heaters. Not for the pool water, but for the airspace. The pool, as it turned out, was just fine as usual, particularly as we got warmed up.

He seems to have nothing more to add for my freestyle form, but that just establishes that there’s not much more wrong—not that there’s nothing I could make better. I’m thinking about my turns more, as well, which means I’m blowing them as often as I’m getting them right.

I know I’ve promised some longer posts, but I’m jammed with deadlines.

Now Playing: She’s So High from Leisure [US] by Blur

Posted by pjm at 3:09 PM | Comments (0)

The frustrating part is that I know I could do better

My events for today were very early in the meet, so even though we’re only about halfway through the day, I’m already done.

I took full advantage of the sprint lanes this morning, doing eight or ten starts off the blocks while they were open, then moving to the warm-up pool when they closed the competition pool to start racing. I had more good starts (functional goggles) than bad, so I was relatively confident. I also was borrowing a cap from my brother, with the idea that having it on over the goggles might help keep them attached.

Posted by pjm at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

Disaster management in the pool

It’s been a few hours since my only race today; I have two tomorrow. The wireless connection is sketchy but mostly usable.

We got here in time to check in, but without a whole lot of time to warm up in the competition pool; they were setting up sprint lanes (where you can practice a block start, then get out at the other end of the lane,) as we checked in. After changing, I did a few laps in another lane before moving to a sprint lane to try my first block starts since New Englands in April. They didn’t go very well—in the first two, my goggles wound up around my nose, and on the third, they stayed on but filled with water. Then we were whistled out for the start of racing. I wasn’t terribly confident about my start.

I mentioned this to my brother. “All you need to do is get in the water,” he said. “It doesn’t need to be perfect.” In other words, do what you can to protect the goggle seal.

Posted by pjm at 3:07 PM | Comments (2)

Colonies Zone Short Course Meters championship

Good grief, there are a lot of people at this meet. I suppose because it’s the whole Zone (Virginia and north) and not just New England, but we’ve got the Wheaton pool jammed full. It’s incredible.

Among others, I ran in to a high school cross-country teammate. He was one of those who struggled through cross-country season, then (being built like Gumby) was a really good swimmer, particularly in backstroke. He’s just come back to swimming in the last year, after burning out in college, and seemed really pleased to see me—specifically mentioning how much he liked watching “us” (me and the other front-runners) running. It was quite a lift.

Wireless is sketchy but usable. Full report on my race is on the way. They have a video camera on the pool, hooked to a Tivo on the deck running about twenty minutes delayed, so you can go over and watch your race when you’re done; as a result, some of the report is based on what I saw and was aware of during the race, and some of it I learned later.

Posted by pjm at 2:38 PM | Comments (0)

Harvard has it in for me

My brother sent an email the other day with the rumored dates of the New England Masters SCY meet in the spring. Unfortunately, the first day, Distance Day, is the first Saturday of my university’s spring break, and I have plane tickets to go somewhere warm that day. The remaining three days are the following Friday, Saturday and Sunday; I expect to be returning from somewhere warm on Saturday, and I doubt I’ll want to swim on Sunday. (I could be wrong, of course.)

This is unfortunate, but it’s probably the only time that NEM could get the Harvard pool: around Harvard’s spring break. And when I balance “several days away from the miserable New England March” against “a chance to swim a big, competitive meet,” getting away from March wins every time.

When I get a few minutes, I’ll need to start looking for another target meet for the spring.

Posted by pjm at 2:03 PM | Comments (0)

I must have wanted to do this for at least ten minutes

…because that’s how long it must have taken for me to fill out the entry form for this meet. Actually, maybe fifteen, since I had to use a calculator to figure out my seed times; this is a SCM meet (Short Course Meters) and almost all the short course meets one usually does are yards. In fact, the last time I raced SCM was in high school, where Boothbay had the only meters pool in our league. (Bates had a pool with a movable bulkhead, so they could swim SCY or SCM, but it was set for yards when we had meets there.)

Anyway, I used my times from last spring’s Simon’s Rock meet and piped them through the calculator to get some seed times. I have no idea how accurate they are, but I’ve noticed that I seem to be pretty close to the median in the ordered time lists, rather than closer to the bottom as I’ve come to expect.

Now Playing: Paint A Vulgar Picture from Strangeways, Here We Come by The Smiths

Posted by pjm at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)

It seldom hurts to ask

I emailed the University swim coach to ask for help.

A. pointed out that this was unlikely to get me anywhere, since most varsity coaches have their hands full with their teams, but I figured the worst that could happen was that he just wouldn’t reply. I introduced myself, explained my swimming situation (bored and plateaued,) and asked for advice. I figure I need some combination of three things: new workouts, a long-range workout plan, and some feedback about my form.

After a long time with no response, I got email saying, yes, he’s really busy, but come to the Advanced Swimming phys ed. class three mornings a week, and he’d expand their workouts for me.

I’ve been to two, now, and it’s a good start. I’m doing the “advanced” workouts, and while the yardage is well within my range, the intensity of the workouts is a good bit higher than I was maintaining on my own. Most of the sets have 20- or 15-second recoveries, which is not much at all. It’s work, no question. There’s also a senior Mechanical Engineering major who is just about my speed, so I feel like I’m working out with someone.

The downside is that these don’t really constitute a training program, other than the progressive nature inherent in a class. Also, because the skill level of the class is largely lower than my own, it seems unlikely that we’ll be doing any butterfly drills, for example.

I’ve actually registered to take the class next semester. I can’t get credit for it, so it’s a little pointless, but I feel like it may balance things out somewhere in administration-land.

Of course, the coach mis-heard my name when I came to the pool on Monday, so he’s been calling me “Mark” for a few days. (It should be obvious, but for those who don’t know me, that’s not any fraction of my name.) I’m trying to think of a graceful way to make the correction, and I’m half tempted to just let him go; we both know what he means, after all.

Now Playing: Uniform Grey from You Were Here by Sarah Harmer

Posted by pjm at 9:53 PM | Comments (0)

Workout group

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

Posted by pjm at 6:07 PM | Comments (0)

Whining

Nobody is allowed to gripe about their workout when the man in lane 1 leaves his right foot on the deck with his sandals.

Posted by pjm at 9:04 AM | Comments (0)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

There was, for a while, a theory in developmental biology which suggested that all species went through each phase of their evolution in the course of their development to adulthood. The theory—known sometimes, now, as “Haeckel’s Lie“—has been largely discredited, but I still think of it in the pool.

While I’ve made some gains in strength over the last few years in the pool, much more of my improvement has simply been form. I’ve learned how to breathe more efficiently, control my body roll, kick more powerfully, streamline longer when I push off the wall, and get more distance from each cycle of my arms.

As I get tired, though, these advances desert me in roughly the reverse order I picked them up, a sort of reverse ontogeny of my swimming form. I seldom let myself get tired enough to thrash the way I see some people do, but it would come eventually.

The point of training, of course, is to push back that degeneration of form, to be able to swim the length of ever-longer races while maintaining efficient form. To evolve, in fact.

Now Playing: Georgia O from Play by The Nields

Posted by pjm at 10:54 AM | Comments (1)

Turtle progress

The University pool is not much bigger than the one at the Amherst Middle School where I swam last winter, but at least they put in the lane lines. It was crowded early in the semester, but I suspect many students are finding it hard to fit undirected exercise in to the cycle of hard studying and intense relaxation. In the morning, there is always a lane for me. The lanes aren’t as wide as they are at the College, so it’s harder to split them. I imagine the University swim team practicing in shifts. All things considered, though, it’s not quite as bad as I was led to believe.

Turning up regularly is paying off. I frequently feel sluggish or tired during the warm-up, but I’m making it through slightly longer sets again. Sometimes, early in the main set, I’ll find my hands fidgeting between repeats, waiting to pull on the water again.

I note this kind of subtle changes because I don’t time most of my repeats, so it’s not easy for me to see progress beyond what I can feel. It’s very easy to see progress in running, but for me, not so much so in swimming. I can only check how I feel completing certain sets, and pay attention to my form. It pays not to thrash around, so I’ve been concentrating on smoothing out my stroke and maintaining good body position, and that gets me through the sets quickly enough.

I’m thinking about asking the University coach for some help. I’m too advanced for the PE swim classes, I think, but I could probably benefit from some more direct coaching.

Now Playing: Fortress by Pinback

Posted by pjm at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

Like running, but not

I realized today (eight, nine, turn) that the reason swimming is so different for me than running (ten, eleven, turn) is that it’s not really like running at all—it’s like steeplechasing (eight, nine, turn.) You hit a consistent number of strokes/strides, then perform a quick gymnastic maneuver before getting back into your stroke/stride as efficiently as possible. The pool I’ve been in introduces another quirk—a current which makes “down” and “back” a different number of strokes. Still, it’s pretty fun to watch the wall going by when you can do 25m in eight strokes.

I’ve also re-discovered that one of the growth phases in any racing sport is finding a distinction between “hard” and “easy.” The distinction eventually gets refined into various stages of “hard,” including one which focuses on the balance point between “pleasantly difficult” and “painful,” but that first step of “hard” and “easy” is the fundamental one. I did a workout this afternoon with only three reps: 600m, 400m, and 200m. They broke up, though, into hard/easy sections; the 600m, for example, went 50m hard, 50m easy, 100m hard, 100m easy, 150m hard, 150m easy. It’s an accomplishment, for me, just to do the workout; to have a “hard” pace which is different from “just get down the pool,” and an “easy” pace which is actually relaxed enough to allow recovery. It’s the same step I made, coming up to high school cross-country, when I started running variable-pace workouts and intervals, and learned about stress and recovery.

I doubt I’ll be in that pool more than once or twice more, due to their closing next Wednesday and my varied schedule before then. No tragedy, that. It’s been very convenient to have a pool so close to us (it’s barely a five-minute walk) and the fee for the pass is very reasonable, but there’s no dedicated lap-swim time and unless the pool is largely empty, I’m constantly having to steer around someone else (i.e. a clump of frolicking kids during “Adult Only” hours, or, on at least one occasion, the “lifeguards” goofing off.) And there’s the nonsensical “clear the pool every 50 minutes” rule/law/silliness. Maybe if they plopped in some lane lines (the hooks are there, in the wall,) it would be more usable, but the fact is they aren’t set up for lap swimmers, the same way my night school wasn’t set up to prepare students for graduate programs.

Now Playing: Girl by The Blueskins

Posted by pjm at 6:29 PM | Comments (0)

Short pool

Even if it is, in fact, a state law and not just a pool rule, that just makes it a silly law instead of a silly rule.

(Background: I had just turned into the final lap of a 2000m workout when the lifeguards whistled me out; they were clearing the pool as they do every 50 minutes. Good thing I wasn’t trying to do a 3000m set?!?)

(And, I might add, these lifeguards do not inspire one to follow rules obediently. On which more later, if I still feel peeved.)

Posted by pjm at 5:38 PM | Comments (1)

Long pool

There is a park out our front windows, and at the other end of the park is a pool. We arrived too late to get much use from it, but since I won’t be in the University pool for a few more weeks, I trotted down yesterday to get a $15 pool pass for the days remaining until it closes at the end of this month. The staff was brusque and prickly as you might expect yesterday when I was signing up, and in fact, they were a bit difficult today when I showed up today, as they were kicking the kids out for “adult swim” time, to collect and use my new pass.

Practically nobody turns up for the adult swim hours. When they kicked the kids out at 4, I got in, and I was the only one in the pool until they closed at 5. (I didn’t swim the whole hour; nobody got in after me.) I believe the pool is 25 meters (not yards), aka “short course meters,” and it has a current: it takes me eleven strokes swimming towards the building, and nine swimming away. A 25y pool with no current is either eight or nine strokes, depending on how tired I am. I asked a lifeguard if it was 25 yards; he was uncertain and suggested 27 yards, which would confirm my 25m theory, since 25m is 27 yards and three inches.

The lifeguards were a crew of high school and early college age kids, and typically uninterested in someone who only went up and back in the pool, but the adult staff was fascinated with me. When I was leaving, the woman who had given me my pass asked if I was a “serious swimmer.” I’d only done 1500m, and a good in-season winter workout should be twice that; I was doing 2,000y to 2,400y in Amherst. I wasn’t particularly self-impressed, but I guess it made me about as serious an athlete as they ever see there. I told them I would be running more than an hour a day if I could, so half an hour of swimming didn’t count for much in my view.

They were still pretty impressed, and it clearly had changed their attitude towards me. Instead of being yet another person ignoring the rules (the multitude of posted and printed rules in that place is staggering) and making their jobs difficult, I became someone who was positively interested in improving myself with the service they provided, and they started telling me which hours were the best times to come and have the pool to myself, which is actually very useful information. I also suspect they’re overlooking some of the more inconvenient rules for me, like the one which would appear to keep me from leaving my pull buoy, kickboard, paddles, etc. on the wall while I’m not using them.

Now Playing: The Shore and Stars by Austin Hartley-Leonard

Posted by pjm at 8:37 PM | Comments (0)

Crunch

If I was running these days, I wouldn’t be.

As I waded back to shore at Puffer’s Pond yesterday afternoon, I stubbed my toes on a rock—not particularly hard, I thought, but I did trip and splash.

By an hour or two later, the second toe of my right foot (yes, the lame paw) was looking bruised, and by bedtime about half the toe was an attractive grape color. I iced it a bit, then taped it to the third toe and hoped for the best.

It seems likely that there’s some tendon damage; at worst, it may be broken. It’s not aching in quite the same way this morning as it did last night, so I’m hoping the bruise dissipates and I can stop taping it after a few more days.

Fortunately, due to a former phase of foot issues which I thought might be helped by taping, I have a lot of athletic tape around.

Now Playing: Insomnia And The Hole In The Universe from Secret Samadhi by Live

Posted by pjm at 8:57 AM | Comments (0)

Snapshots

There’s no way I’ll get all the mental posts from the weekend done. So, bullet points. I will expand if someone thinks any of these are that interesting, but somehow I doubt it.

• I figured, based on map-site estimates, that we’d get to Montreal around midnight if we hit all our exchanges. But first, I got held up on 91 in Greenfield (before I even got out of MA!) and then beat my brother to West Lebanon by nearly an hour. We wound up bound for Burlington right around 8, and we still made it to the hotel by 11:30. Apparently the map sites budget too much time for crossing the border.

• I don’t think I fully appreciated the degree to which Montreal is a francophone city. I snapped back into my travel mode where I don’t really expect people to understand me when I talk to them.

• The swimming World Championships are much smaller than track. It’s clearly a big deal, but I’ve seen high school basketball games with more seating (and higher attendance). I realized that one advantage to sitting in the press section is that you have heat sheets and results handed to you during the meet. I missed that, a little. On the other hand, since the swimmers touch every 50m and stay in lanes, they’re able to split out every race and track progress in very fine detail, which is nearly impossible on the track (just ask anyone who’s tried to split multiple athletes in a 10,000m.)

• We had lunch with the pseudonymous wolf angel, at a hip little place called Kilo. Needless to say, there will be no pictures posted, since the cats did not attend. We carped about everyone else’s concept of what IT departments are for. She delivered us to the top of Mt. Royal, where we gawked at the scenery before hoofing it back down to the Metro.

• Despite the size of the crowd, when the Canadian woman was swimming for second in the women’s 800m free, it was loud.

• On the drive back to the border, we passed an (ahem) exotic dancing establishment shrouded in smoke from a neighboring barbeque. We raced for the obvious joke… “That place is smokin’!”

• The locals looking for a bar at the convenience store in Barre—having apparently closed down the Applebee’s next door—definitely had the potential to get me in trouble by laughing at them. I managed to contain myself.

• After midnight, you can drive from West Leb to Amherst in an hour and a half, assuming you don’t meet any state troopers. (Vermounties?) Total travel time from Montreal to Amherst, including a few stops: somewhat less than 5:30. So, not as close as New York and Boston, but somewhat closer than Philadelphia.

Now Playing: Wildflowers from Wildflowers by Tom Petty

Posted by pjm at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)

Maine Powah

I think the first world record I saw in person was Michael Johnson’s 400m in Seville at the 1999 World Championships. Since then, what with the women’s pole vault going up a few centimeters every year and a few fast indoor meets, I’ve lost count of how many world records I’ve witnessed. I’m pretty sure it’s still in single digits, though.

As projected, we saw another one Saturday evening. Ian Crocker, who as a high schooler trained in the same pool my brother did, had nearly half a body-length lead by the time he reached our end of the pool in the 100m fly (called “papillion” on the scoreboard.) He beat Michael Phelps by over a second, and put up a world-record time of 50.40.

Somewhere around Iberville on the way home, my brother was telling me about the things the embedded-circuit engineers in his office screen on internal-use boards. One of them was a power contact. The label? “Maine Powah.”

Now Playing: Disturbance At The Heron House from Document by R.E.M.

Posted by pjm at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

Real fast now

It’s time to depart on my barnstorming tour of the North. It’s as good a time as any to figure out if my passport has been revoked.

My brother has stopped short of promising a world record in the 100m fly*, but he’s definitely indicated that he expects to see one. I’ve seen world records at world championships before, and the first one—Michael Johnson for 400m in Seville ‘99—probably happened faster than this one (if it happens) is likely to.

I’ve only ever been to Canada for sports events.

* Eeugh: FINA does all their results in PDFs. The IAAF site is much, much better.

Now Playing: April Fool from Grave Dancers Union by Soul Asylum

Posted by pjm at 4:00 PM | Comments (0)

Drinking salt water

Yesterday, my father and I kayaked beside my brother as he swam the (roughly) 2.4 miles from Peaks Island in Casco Bay to East End Beach in Portland.

(Forgive me for that photo; it was taken with a cell-phone camera from a bobbing kayak.)

Unlike this morning, when A and my father ran a road race in East Boothbay (not far from this sign,) I did not feel any stirrings of inspiration to try a similar feat myself.

Posted by pjm at 8:41 PM | Comments (0)

Better swimmers

The pool was crowded this morning. All the usual suspects were there, plus a few others. Fortunately, they had more lane-lines in the pool than usual; sometimes they’ll just put one row in and let the rest of us follow the block-line on the bottom. The lane lines damp everyone’s wake a bit (with no lines, the chop can get dramatic,) and allows two people to share one lane.

I was on the end, and you could say I was sharing my lane when I started out. There was a tiny little frog, no longer than my index finger, sitting on the gutter-shelf right at the waterline. His head stuck out, but the rest of him was submerged. I wondered if the chlorine bothered him.

As I warmed up, my wake gradually bumped him halfway down the gutter. Eventually he vanished; I don’t know if he went up on the deck, or under me and into the rest of the pool.

Now Playing: Merry Christmas, Mr. Jones from Bob On The Ceiling by The Nields

Posted by pjm at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)

The setback

Today is the one-week mark from my last run. I was feeling abnormally footsore after runs last week, and on Friday at the office I started getting the old feeling of tearing in my arch. By Friday night I was feeling symptoms of “classic PF” (as opposed to the bizarre PF-like issues I had last year) which included the sensation described by Ned as “like someone was driving a nail into my heel.”

So I stopped running. I went on a long ride in the Quabbin Sunday, carrying Gatorade for A’s run, and on Monday I paid my dues to use the town’s outdoor pools this summer. I’ve been in the pool three days now, and the other two days I’ve cranked to work on the bike. The pain in my heel is gone, but the arch is still sore. As long as it hurts, I’m not running.

Needless to say, this is frustrating; I thought I was on the way back, and I’d even run the annual July 4th road race in my hometown. Ten years earlier, I’d won it (mainly by running my competition literally into the ground on a hot day,) but this year I jogged it with a former high-school teammate who was short on training miles. I don’t think the race set me back; I don’t know what it was. And I still don’t know what’s wrong with the foot; everyone I ask tells me something different. I just know that it hurts, and running makes it worse.

On the up side, I’m encouraged by how easy it has been to get back into swimming. I thought I would have lost a lot of fitness, but I did 2,000y workouts both Wednesday and today. I’d do more, but the lap-swim time block is small, and I need to get there earlier to put in more yards. I’m hoping to work in some lifting, too.

This isn’t a long-term solution, though. The drawback to all these alternate exercise methods (swimming/lifting/biking) is that they require preparation and, in some cases, access to facilities. If I can run, all I need are my shoes and some time; I can do it any time in the day, from nearly anywhere. To swim, for example, I need to plan to be at the pool during lap swim hours (and, hopefully, not the “lap/open” block, which means dozens of kids who don’t understand lane etiquette.) I need to have suits, goggles, a towel, etc., much of which needs to be collected from various drying racks. And I need to drive to the pool.

And in August, when we move, any habits I can develop now will be disrupted.

Now Playing: Seasons Changed from My Friends and I by Patiokings

Posted by pjm at 11:10 AM | Comments (4)

Fear and loathing in northern New England

It seems likely that my brother and I will be barnstorming up to Montreal for one day of the FINA World Championships. (I’ve been to two World Championships in Athletics, the IAAF’s track equivalent, but never a swim meet I couldn’t be competing in myself.)

Anyway, since I no longer have vacation days, the roughly 36-hour tentative plan goes like this:

• Leave work at earliest reasonable hour.
• Meet in Hanover, NH (or in the neighborhood) and park one car.
• Drive until Montreal, probably arriving at some single-digit morning hour. Sleep until…
• Morning sessions. Rounds of a few events. I bet the swimming 1500m is nothing like the running 1500m.
• Explore what parts of the city we can reach before…
• Evening session. Local-boy-makes-good Ian Crocker faces off against Ian Thorpe in some painful sprint event. I’d bring a Maine flag, but nobody could tell it from the flags of a few dozen other states.
• Leave Montreal, probably sometime in the area of 9 PM.
• Leave Hanover for home, arriving at some absurd single-digit morning hour.
• Sleep all day Sunday.

I’m thinking I may need some of these. Or at least massive quantities of tea.

Posted by pjm at 4:53 PM | Comments (1)

Another season ends

There was a sign on the College pool door this morning with exam-week hours, which can be boiled down to, “Only open while I’m at work.” Exam week is next week, so today was the last morning I’ll be swimming there for a while. Sometime in the summer they will have afternoon hours I can sometimes make, but for now, no.

Later today, I saw a terse “in memoriam” note on the College’s website for “Henry Dunbar ‘44.” If I have my connections right, that was “Hank” Dunbar, the swim coach when I arrived at the College. My brother, who swam in the same conference, knew him as the coach who walked the deck with his pant-legs rolled up and gum-boots on. The collection of photos and All-American plaques in the upper gallery of the pool is named The Dunbar Gallery now, so I have been swimming under his name for a while now; unless things have changed, the crew has a boat named for him as well, since he was a former coach of that team.

I don’t think I ever talked to Hank, but my first-year roommate, a swimmer, was recruited by him and was sad to see him retire after that first season. He was a strong personality, for certain.

Posted by pjm at 3:13 PM | Comments (2)

Mailbag

Dear pjm,

We’re happy to hear of your attempts to involve us more in your exercise efforts. That little run on Tuesday morning was quite refreshing, and the new shoes are quite nice to us.

That said, we’re more than a little sore today. We appreciate the swimming workout this morning, but alleviating soreness through more work is not, shall we say, the most logical route. You may want to get off your little anti-pill-enabled-exercise high horse and try some Vitamin I. You can make as many jokes as you please about being “still a teenager in hex,” but you are getting older.

What’s more, the swimming might be more effective if you kicked the low-grade cold and trained the new blood some more.

Perhaps you should consider riding to work rather than running tomorrow. Think of it as friendly advice, but think of it, OK?

Sincerely,
Your legs

P.S. Could you have a talk with your back? It won’t stop whining. It’s annoying.

Now Playing: Columbus from Heyday by The Church

Posted by pjm at 3:46 PM | Comments (0)

Row upon row

The NEM-SCY meet handles results distribution by printing out some 140 pages of sticky labels (three columns, ten rows) with everyone’s results, sorted by swimmer’s name. I downloaded the PDF tonight to take a look. Three swimmers with my last name occupy five rows plus: sixteen marks. One is mine. Six go to a distant relative in Rhode Island. The remaining nine, over half the total, are my brother.

I say, next year let’s hunt up a fourth and enter as our own team.

Now Playing: What Are You Waiting For? from Back to Me by Kathleen Edwards

Posted by pjm at 7:55 PM | Comments (0)

Positive split, negative effort

Runners have a term, negative split, which means to cover the second half of a distance faster than the first half. (Unfortunately, it’s only easy to explain why it’s “negative” with calculus.) I wanted to negative split today’s race—swim the second 500 faster than the first. A careful negative split is a good way to race, because it allows you to finish fast; it’s also the best way to run the Boston Marathon, because it leaves you strong for the Newton hills. I reminded myself of that as I stretched and fidgeted behind the blocks waiting for the race. And I remembered my brother’s pacing advice, which was “comfortably fast.”

I got a good start and kept my goggles on. The first lap doesn’t count, because the block start gives you a pretty big advantage. I didn’t see the counter my brother was dipping in at his end of the pool; I think he kept it out for a few laps to let me settle. Or maybe I wasn’t looking up enough to see it; he was probably swinging it side to side, which is our code for “back off.” I was out pretty quickly, twelve seconds ahead of my intended pace at 200y, but I didn’t know that. I was in an end lane, so there was only one swimmer beside me, and I put half a length on him in that 200.

I settled pretty well, and felt quite good through halfway. I knew by the time I reached the 500y point that I was going to finish without blowing up completely, which was reassuring. I also knew it was time to get cracking. At 6:51, I was still nine seconds ahead of pace, but I’d dropped three seconds in the last three laps, and now the counter was dipping up and down, the code for “push harder.”

OK, no worries. I’m negative splitting. I started what I hoped would be a Culpepper-esque drive for the finish. Alan Culpepper, who won the Olympic Marathon Trials last February, has a way of building his pace up gradually from a long way out, so he’s at a flat-out sprint by the finish. There’s never a big move, just a continual raising of the stakes. That was how I started working: just push a little more, each lap.

That worked for about three laps. By the fourth it was clear that my lane neighbor was negative splitting much more effectively than I was. He was picking up ground on me again. I figured out afterward that he had a rival on his other side that he was trying to catch, but I wanted to hold him off. One or two laps later it was clear that I wasn’t going to manage that; I was turning faster, and actually gaining some ground on my turns, but he was just plain swimming faster, and my arms couldn’t pull all the water they could reach.

I kept pushing, though. At about 800y I realized how people could swim so hard they puked. (I didn’t; I just identified for a moment.) But just 200 to go, and I’ve done so many 200s.

I wound up with a good last 100, and finished in 13:49.18, beating my seed time by almost eleven seconds. I was, in fact, last in my age group, but with a surprise: I was 9th, not 7th, and quite close to 8th. I was seeded over a minute and a half behind, but some slower seeds had been slipped in since they printed the psych sheets. So I did both better and worse than I had expected. I was particularly pleased with my 6:51/6:58 halves; just a year ago, I swam 6:49 for a straight 500 at this meet. And even though I hadn’t managed the negative split, I’d definitely pushed much harder in the second half than I had in the first. It was a negative-split effort, even if the execution wasn’t perfect.

My brother and I, between us, scored 25 points for Maine Masters. He scored more than twice as many as I did, though: he won his (our) age group in his event.

I think I’d do it again.

Posted by pjm at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

One kiloyard

Because of everything else, I haven’t been thinking too much about what I have to do tomorrow. Specifically, race twice as far as I’ve ever raced in a pool. I only think about it when I’m in the pool, and the (otherwise empty) College pool seems about as far from the organized chaos of the NEM-SCY meet as you can get. (Think Penn Relays, if you’ve ever been there.)

I should be anticipating a bit, maybe doing some positive visualization. I should at least be getting mentally ready—“morally ready,” as I once heard it expressed in Russian—to swim twenty laps. I know I can cover the distance; I did it this morning. But this morning it was broken up into segments. (Including four block-starts, just for confidence.) It’s what kind of pace I will set, whether I will settle into something I can maintain, if I’ll be able to maintain form to the end.

This should be like a conference meet, because it’s the big race at the end of my season. But I haven’t really been looking it in the face. It doesn’t feel like the end of a long training buildup, either because my training really hasn’t been all that good (though, I suppose, better than last year) or because I can’t get that motivated about training for swimming.

At least this year I have a team.

Now Playing: Diamond In Your Heart from Spirit Touches Ground by Josh Clayton-Felt

Posted by pjm at 11:18 AM | Comments (1)

Psyched

They posted the psych sheets for New Englands this weekend. I didn’t plow through and figure out where I would be seeded based on my times from earlier this year, since I’m only swimming one event. It’s really an exercise in masochism, anyway: in the 1,000y freestyle (“deep end,” since I decided to risk losing my goggles in trade for the one- or two-second advantage conferred by starting from blocks rather than starting in the water,) I am seeded 31st out of 50, and even that is something of a technicality. Six of us guessed we’d swim 14:00, so we’re all “tied” at 31. Some of us are sandbagging, and others, like myself, are optimists.

My brother is seeded fifth in the 1650y free, which was cool enough, but then I checked the sheets sorted by age group. All the four in front of him are under 30. Then I scrolled down to the 1000, and discovered that I’m seeded last in my age group by about a minute and a