Open Water Swimming

Another long swim down. I gave myself a rest day on Saturday to let my allover tight body recover from some hard swims and a Friday-night yoga session. Today, I swam a weird combination of 50s, 100s, and 600s. I began with a 1000 warmup, like last time, dividing half into freestyle swimming and half into alternating 50s breast kick and dolphin kick on my back. I honestly think focusing on the latter has strengthened my core, and though I’m still not super adept at making my body go far underwater while on my back, every time I work at it, it gets easier to stay underwater longer. My rhythm is getting better, too. Instead of feeling like a chipmunk bopping around in the water, I’m feeling more like a snake.

I once read that the longer you’re underwater and in motion, the more you improve your lung capacity, and (duh) the more beneficial that is for swimming.  At practice one day last week, my coach banned boards. So all the kicking was underwater. It’s painful, especially if your kick set comes after a tough freestyle set and you want to cruise through it. (Ahem. But I would *never* do that.) So I decided not to use a board today, even on the breaststroke kicks. It wasn’t as painful as I thought. Perhaps that was because they came near the beginning of the workout.

Back to my workout. I did 20 x 50s on 1:00 to give me plenty of rest, and really worked at them. By the end, I had dropped 4 seconds, consistently, from my first few 50s. It felt like somewhat of an accomplishment. Next came a set with my teammate: 400, 300, 200, 100. On the 400, I was supposed to get my time at the 300 mark and try to beat it on the following 300. (I didn’t. But not by much.) The same was to be repeated on the latter intervals; fortunately, I did beat the times on these.  Then I swam 3 x 600s with a minute rest in between, followed by 11 x 100s, every fourth back, to give me some air! (It would have been twelve, had it not been time for the kiddies’ swim lessons to start.) The 600s were mostly long, slow distance, but on the last one I made every fourth 50 A.F.A.H.P. (as fast as humanly possible, as my coach likes to say). I’m beat, but I’ve now surpassed the distance of my first race, the Nanticoke River Swim, a three-miler, and I’m not dead. I’ve got two more weekends left for long swims until the first big race of the season — this is not counting a weekend trip to my folks’ place in Pennsylvania, and the Zones swim meet at GMU the weekend before, where I will partake in no distance events longer than a 100 (breast).

But there’s always time during the week for “long swims,” which, for clarity’s sake, I’ll define as greater than 5,000 yards. Unfortunately, my low vitamin D status has still got me tired, though compared to a month ago, I am feeling terrific. After extensive Google searching to find out how long it’s going to be before I start feeling normal again, I stumbled upon a chronic fatigue sufferer’s website.  I found the following: “If you start taking vitamin D every day, it will take about six weeks for the circulating vitamin D to reach its peak.” I have no idea how credible this is, but I guess I’ll see in two or three more weeks. And does this mean that I could “peak” out at a level that’s not optimal? (I guess I should have just called my doctor. Maybe I will tomorrow.)

So yes, I could do a long swim during the week, but with a typical day-shift work schedule, it’s not really possible unless I get in the water at 5 a.m. and beg Coach to let me swim with high schoolers who are 1,000 times faster than I, or I swim at night when I’m probably too tired; even if I do make it to the pool at 6 p.m., swimming energizes me too much to fall asleep afterward! So, I shall savor the sanctity of my weekend distance swims.

One last thought about my weekly training. After my coach returned from high school nationals last weekend, he encouraged my teammates and I to work on a 6 beat kick. “All the first-place kids were the ones with the fastest kicks,” he mentioned several times in his motivational pitch. Along with adjusting my hand entry, which I’ll talk about in a later post, it was a magic bullet that helped me to make (and get more than five seconds rest on) all of the intervals during my freestyle sets last week. Considering that the legs muscles use a lot of oxygen, kicking harder is a tough change to incorporate into all freestyle swimming all the time. It’s also tough to remember to practice kicking like that when you’re trying to improve so many aspects of your stroke, but all it took to realize I could be swimming faster was ten minutes at the end of the workout to practice this on sets of 25s.

Whether it’s scrutinizing stroke DVDs, kicking harder, or rotating the body just a little bit more, I’ve learned that just a little effort can go a long way.

Hi, readers. It’s Allison. As you may have seen, my posts about distance swimming this winter have been absent. This past weekend, after 9-and-10-hour nights of sleep, I finally had the motivation to get over to the pool and get in some real distance. (Depending on how you define distance, of course.) As I write this, my shoulders and triceps are mildly burning, and I’m satisfied with my weekend progress.

While my Bay Swim peers have routinely been getting in 5000-7000 yard workouts, my longest this season has been around 4400. My fairly consistent weekly workouts have consisted of three-to-five weekly swims of 3500 and 4200 interval-based yards with the NOVA Masters. (Rumor has it that those practices are the toughest in Richmond. I’d concur, except I haven’t really swum with anyone else.) I practice yoga, which is probably the biggest factor in maintaining my flexibility, once a week, and have been getting a full-body (90 minutes; upper/lower body and abs) weightlifting session in once a week, which most coaches would argue isn’t enough, but has helped. And I’ve been sleeping. A lot.

In February, after almost five months of lethargy and fatigue, my smart mom and my doc figured out that I was (very) low in vitamin D. Aha! It all makes sense. I’d wake up, go to the pool in the dark, go to work in a windowless office, and leave for home in the dark. I’d be outside for a total of 10 minutes a day, bundled up in a coat, scarf and gloves. Last fall, I overslept more morning swim practices than I would have liked (though a 5:15 wake-up call is tough for most people). I was so busy that when I would come home and sleep for twelve hours on Friday nights, it seemed normal — as if I were simply recovering from a long and busy week. If only I knew…

If you’re health conscious, you’ve probably read that everyone who lives north of Atlanta is low in vitamin D. Upon Google searches, I was surprised to find out how critical D is in essential body processes.  Why is it so important?  D primarily helps your intestines absorb calcium — so if you don’t get enough D, your bones won’t get any stronger; if you’re past 30, they’ll get weaker. Lack of D has also been linked to an increased risk of colds and obesity, and a 26% increased risk of death. Yikes. Dr. Michael Holick gives an excellent talk on D deficiency and treatment in a recent People’s Pharmacy podcast.

Most obviously, as I said, I was feeling tired all the time, falling asleep sometimes at 8 or 9 p.m., not able to make it through an evening movie, and struggling with the motivation to do some of the things I loved, including swimming and taking extra steps to keep current with my line of work.  Though (fortunately) I was still pretty happy, my mom suggested SAD (seasonal affective disorder) as a possible culprit. I wasn’t sure, since my moods have been positive, I haven’t gained weight, and I’ve not craved sweets at all this winter; SAD symptoms can include simple-carb cravings, weight gain, and depression. Whether I had moderate SAD or not, the problem has been diagnosed. I’ve been taking 1,000mg of D daily (in addition to a women’s multivitamin, fish oil, magnesium, and biotin) for the past month. And the extra D is helping, slowly but surely! Getting out of bed in the morning has been easier; I’ve still been able to sleep a lot, but a more reasonable 7-10 hours rather than 12!

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, go get your D tested if you’ve been feeling under the weather this winter, and be thankful that spring is here.

Now, on to swimming. Yesterday, I swam 5000 yards; today, 5100. Some may encourage a rest day in between (yes, tomorrow is a rest day); my stubborn mind argues that I did 6000-7000 yards six times per week in high school. I was (not that much) younger then, but I’m stronger and faster now. I’ll tell you briefly about my workouts, which I supplemented with plain old water. I suppose as they get longer I’ll start using the same GU that I’ll take during the Bay Swim (and Nanticoke River Swim on May 3). I didn’t feel like I needed any food during the workouts.

Saturday’s swim was broken down into a 1000 warmup (500 free, every 4th lap stroke; 10 x 50s alternating free and dolphin kick on back); 3 x 600s separated by a 200 back or breast, with a minute or so rest in between; then a 500, 400, 300, 200, 100. Oh, the joy of descending! At first, I was a little frustrated. I got bored with the 600s and used the 200s as a “reward.” But I began to get into a groove, which motivated me to persist. I left the pool looking forward to the next day’s workout.

Sunday: I ran into a teammate and we did a set of 400s together. I did a 500 warmup, then we did 3 x 400s (one straight, one broken by 100 with 20 seconds in between, one broken by 50 at race pace with 10 seconds in between). Talk about getting your heart rate up! I repeated the first two 400s, then swam a timed 1000. By this point, my arms began to feel like lead, as they should have. I switched to some breaststroke kicking before two more 500s to complete the workout.

Am I ready for my distance races yet? No. I comfort myself with the fact that the Bay Swim is nearly three months away, but when I think about where I was in my training two years ago (I think I did 44 miles in March; thus far I’ve done slightly more than 25), it’s a little frightening. After two long swims in 26 hours, I’m feeling the burn. This is what it felt like two years ago after I finished the Bay Swim and the Smith Mountain Lake 5K. This is how I’m going to feel during the Bay Swim, probably regardless of how hard I train, but whatever I can do to build up my endurance in the meantime shall be done between now and June 14.