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...