just when the caterpillar thought that life was over,
it became
a BUTTERFLY!

Monday, April 21, 2008

Starting to like this swimming thing

Well sans the older YMCA crowd in the morning. Cat woke me up at 3:30 for Lord only knows what, rolled over went back to sleep and then the alarm goes off, Kevin jumps out of bed and says are you hitting the shower first... uh shower, for what, he said for work.... I'm looking outside, its still dark, looking at the clock that says 4:15ignore that he said its not right... so I'm looking at the darnkess again realizing there is no freaking way, unless a storm is brewing that its 6:15 and not 4:15 - so finally he looked at his watch DUH ya nut! He climbs back into bed and while I was tempted to do the same... I didn't. Got up and got on my suit and decided today would be a swim day - would like to go tonight but we are suppose to head to a friends in Elgin for dinner.

I was surprised no sore legs, no sore hiney from the ride yesterday, not even the sit bones are sore - hoping the bike fit adjustment and new seat/post are a contributor to all that. The pool felt good, I know most don't care for the pool to be warm, I do, course I'm not doggin' it in the water either, I'm just trying to work my way up yardage/distance wise - still feel like a weenie compared to how far some swim but in my own due time - so today was 30 laps or 60 lengths or 1500 yards or is that pool meters... not sure guess I need to first figure out difference between yard/meter to know how much it really matters eh? Should know but those ole metric skills left me 20+ years ago... which is really funny in some fashion because I can recall about later part of grade school or maybe jr high where they were drilling metric into our head because EVERYTHING was going to change to metric...hhmm guess their still workin' on that one.

Ok according to worldwide Metric calculator (isn't the internet a great thing sometimes) 25 yards = 22.86 meters - so unless I'M looking at this wrong, a yard is farther than a meter. So 1.2 MILES = 2112 yrds or 1932.21 meters. So today I swam
.85227 of a mile then. Maybe I need to do that conversion all the time because it just mentally makes more sense to me, to know how close I am to that 1.2 mile swim. And I know EYE will have to go farther because if I don't do that distance in training, I will lose it during the race.

I never understood marathon training programs where the longest training run is 22ish miles.... uh for me.... I need to at some point in training, go the entire distance I will go at the race. I mean even with a training run of 22 miles, in the actual marathon I still have 4.2 flippin' miles to go... HELLO thats a lot.

Case in point, last year when I trained for SF10 the longest training run, and I think it was 2 or 3 wks out from the acutal Soldier Field 10 miler, was 8 miles, so for ME mentally I had no idea what those extra 2 miles would hold - now I'm no seasoned runner so maybe as you get better at this stuff these kinda things don't matter, but I was running an 11 minute mile right up until mile 8 on race day, I had my Garmin and I knew my clock time too... but at mile 8 I feel apart, I had never gone farther than 8 miles and those last two seemed like hell to me, I walked more in those two miles, I felt winded, tired, all I wanted was the finish line... and in the end those last two miles killed me and my time. I ended up with an 11:55 pace and I know in my heart it was those last 2 miles - I truly feel HAD I gone 10 miles in the course of training, I think I would have been better off... All in all I did what I wanted to do, had fun that weekend with friends and did the thing in under 2 hrs - B A R E L Y - but still under 2 hrs - however had I been able to keep my earlier 11min miles I would have finished in 1:49:something....

So my point here is IF and its a capital IF... I feel I can be ready for a 1/2 IM in September, then it means I must swim farther than 1.2 miles, bike longer than 56 miles and run more than 13.1 miles in my course of training or at some point during the race I will fall apart....

Now if I was a tough beotch like Crackhead.... hell I'd do a 1/2 IM at some point AS training... but I'm not that tough, hell I'd like to channel just an ounce of what she's got in there - but I have to do this, IF I do it, Kim way.

3 comments:

IronSnoopy said...

I'm the opposite from you. If a program or coach tells me that x distance is what I need to do to complete x race...then I go x distance and not one step more! tee hee. It's not exactly laziness... :)...I don't think...!!!

Nice job on getting the swim in!

And extra bonus points for no soreness from yesterday! woot!

IronWaddler said...

Nice job on the swim.

It was great to meet you yesterday. Looking forward to Galena! I felt good too.

A Prelude To... said...

Good luck with your training, Kim!!! You can definitely do a 1/2IM in Sept!!!! You sound like your swimming is going much better than mine - keep up the great work!

Julie A.