Back to Swimming

With my cold rapidly receding I ventured back into the pool for Monday night’s practice. It may seem strange to those who’ve swam competitively but Coach Brad has the team tapering for the UBC swim meet, and for a team whose typical practices have amounted to about 2,000 meters this means our mileage dropping down to about 1,500 meters or less. Don’t laugh, we’re master swimmers (surely an oxymoron if there ever was one). Another interesting factoid: Coach assigned different sets for three categories after the warm up – those who aren’t participating in the meet get a normal workout (but as virtually all the better swimmers are going to the meet ‘normal’ was pretty easy); sprinters (those racing the 50 meter distances); and ‘middle’ and ‘distance’ swimmers (those racing 100 & 200 distances). I’m sure Brad gets a good laugh designing these practices; I certainly find the concept of a 200 meter event considered ‘distance’ highly amusing myself even if entirely cognizant of the fact 200 meters is exactly that for me (it’s so sad). I’m definitely not tapering only two months after I started training so I’m swimming with the remnants of the team not going to the meet. Good thing too because this workout actually pushed me effort-wise. Racing the 25 and 50 meter sprints Coach Brad has the rest of the team doing would have finished me off.

Side note: Ian has left the selection of which races he is going to race up to Brad. This had me puzzled as I personally would want to have some input into what races I was going to do. In the locker room we joked Brad would have him swimming the 200 fly, the 400 IM, and the 400 free (something we could do only because Ian can actually swim those races; if Brad gave them to anyone of us we’d simply laugh in his face). I think the reason Ian gave Coach Brad carte blanche became clear tonight when I learned he moves up to my age bracket in 2007. Likely he doesn’t really care about his 2006 results; 2007 will bring some of his best opportunities to set some new records and I think that’s what he’s working towards. I wish him luck.