Swimming going well so far

I haven't blogged in a while since I've been quite busy at work lately with a few setbacks that I'm still trying to work through but hopefully things will get straightened out shortly.

Fortunately, my swimming has been going fairly well as of recent. I have actually laid off the weights quite a bit and believe it or not, I think it is helping me. I think I actually may be lifting too much weight for a swimmer and it's probably not helping me much. I'll go back on the weights at a later time but just do more reps at a lower weight.

I think there is a good chance that I can break 2:50 in the 200 backstroke next meet. Last night we did a main set of 6x100 Backstroke on 2:30. I was averaging about 1:25 or 1:26 for all of them. I was fairly pleased with that. I would like to try and get that down to closer to 1:20 maybe by the end of the year. That would be really nice. Anyways, one thing at a time but so far, I'm pretty pleased and hopefully I will be able to go under 2:50 at the meet. The only thing I need to make sure of is that I take it out hard in the race. That's what I have been thinking about. I will have a better shot then.

New Year and swim practice

Well, 2007 has been here for a while now and so far it's been pretty quiet. There is not much new to report really. I've just gotten back from holidays about a week ago and am starting to get back into my old routine. I have to admit that this time around it's been tough to get going. I've had a couple of setbacks at work and am trying to work through the problems. I'm hoping to get things resolved by tomorrow or Monday at the latest. My swimming has been going pretty well, although I'm still quite stiff at practice for not having swum much during the holidays. I'm hoping in the next couple of weeks that I'll be able to get my muscles back into the swing of things again.

Due to the snowstorm that we had the day earlier, only 6 of us showed up for Wednesday night's practice. We started off with a 500m warmup doing whatever we wanted. Next, we had a choice of 3 things we could do: 3x50 from a dive on 4:00 all out, 5x100 on 2:30 holding 90% effort or 4x200 Pull on 3:45. I didn't feel much like sprinting so I did the 4x200, but I did it backstroke with Brad's approval. I didn't go that fast. I was somewhere around 3:15 for all of them which isn't too bad considering that I haven't trained much lately.

After that, we did 4x50 kick with fins on 1:00 descending each one. Then, we did 16x25 kick/swim. Going down, it was head up free kick with fins and then coming back, it was butterfly kick with our hands at our sides. The last 2 25s were freestyle and butterfly. We repeated that 4 times.

Next, we did an IM set which was 12x25 IM on :45 and there was a breathing pattern. We had to do 2 breaths on fly, 12 dolphin kicks on back, 3 underwater pullouts for breaststroke and 1 breath for freestyle, and do that 3 times for a total of 12x25.

We finished off the practice with a 200 warm down. Overall, it was a fairly relaxing practice with not too much excitement. I'm sure more people will turn out on Friday than yesterday and then I think things will really start to get frenetic...