the 3rd swim

I am currently loving AND hating my 3 swims per week (up from 2 swims per week last year). I am loving it because it  gives me an extra workout to do per week (more hours = more badass) and I KNOW it will make me faster in the water. However, I hate it because now I smell like chlorine almost all the time, I hate trekking to the gym that 3rd time (actually I hate all trips to the gym), and it messes up my schedule of MWF bike/run, TT swim/lift. The 3rd swim is on Friday. Friday is a hard day to have an extra workout, but it does beat having it on the weekend, where I was prone to skipping it. So last week I HTFUed it and got it done.. pretty late because I had to work til 6:30. Tomorrow I will HTFU it again and get it DONE!

The drive to destroy my (only) Ironman PR is what is REALLY getting me to the 3rd swim.

Today I had Mary's infamous "Ironman swim set." Let me run you through this set, which has been gazed upon by the eyes of many Train-This athletes, but I had yet to see it. I actually didn't even realize that I had this workout today until this morning because I tend to not really look at workouts in advance (I know more or less what my workout structure is like, and I look at details right before I do the workout). So, here it is!

Warm Up:
500 yds easy

Main Set:
500 yds: every 4th 25 FAST
500 yds: every 3rd 25/50 hard
500 yds: every other 25/40 hard
500 yds: maintain best average 100 yd time

800 yds: kick with or without fins

5x400 yds: pull with P&B on T-time + 10 sec

Cool Down:
200 yds easy

Total: 5500 yds


Now, this is not as bad as it looks. Instructions were to swim as much of the set as possible in an hour, and then stop. Every swim workout I do takes about an hour, so I was not overwhelmed by this. I managed to do all of the 500s, the entire kick set (I used fins FOR SURE), and 200 yds of pulling before I ran out of time, totaling 3500 yds. I think I did pretty well, and I REALLY liked the set. I loved the 500s with the hard/easy intervals because I think that caters to my swimming abilities (i.e. I am terrible at speedwork of all kinds) and will really be helpful for Ironman because during Ironman there is no resting at the wall!

Also, I will 'fess up to being the girl from Mary's blog post today who never remembers her T-time. That's me! For the past 2 months I have been blatantly disregarding my T-time (although I can gauge it pretty well while swimming) until Mary made me look it up and then double checked to make sure I had followed through (which I did!). If that's the worst thing I do as an athlete (Mary, no answering this!!!!) then I don't think I'm so bad!

So I am excited about swimming more, I am being honest about my swimming, working hard, not cutting corners, and I am ready to go balls to the wall in all aspects of my training this year. I am already hitting 13 hours per week and it's only January!

Let's get GOING!