Late Night Practices at Chimo Pool

Last night our practice was held at Chimo Pool in Coquitlam instead of Bonsor Pool in Burnaby as it’s closed for annual maintenance. There must be some serious problems at Bonsor as I’ve never heard of a pool needing to shut down for over two weeks every year. Maybe every five years, but not every year. Perhaps even budget constraints? Anyways, what with the change in venue, the late 9:30 PM start, and the heavy snowfall over the weekend we had only five swimmers in attendance. So we all had a lane each. Interestingly we were all from Lanes Five and Six with the exception of Damien who, like Joe, swims Lane Four as a matter of preference rather than need. Coach Brad must have felt like he was coaching a real swim team. Certainly in my opinion the workout suggested it.

Warm up: 10x50 swim on 0:50
Kick/fins set: 250 on 5:00 (1:00/50)
200 on 3.40 (0:55/50)
150 on 2:30 (0:50/50)
100 on 1:30 (0:45/50)
30 sec rest
2x50 on 0:40
IM set: 16x25 on 0:40 drill / swim
Main set: 4x100 IM (declining 1-4) on 2:30
Warm down: 200 drill / swim
Total distance: 2,300 meters.

Warm up consisted of 4x50 swim free plus a 50 swim swimmer’s choice repeated twice at what for me was a fairly fast tempo of fifty seconds per fifty. That should be obvious looking at Saturday’s workout when I complained about my difficulties dealing with 8x50 on 1:00 at the end of my workout. This is a warm up? We then proceeded to a massive kick set w/fins totaling 800 meters ending with us having to sprint kick two fifties on forty seconds. I knew right away fins or no fins I wasn’t going to be able to do those last two fifties, especially since I’d be coming in about 15 seconds late from the 100. True to form I ended up just turning around and continuing on with the last fifty for basically another 100 kick. I did get to practice my rollover turn though, which was good. But along with Darren, who like me has just started Masters Swimming this September and is still working on basic conditioning, we were well behind the rest. Next came a new drill: in reverse IM order we did four twenty-fives of each stroke with the first and third fifty exchanging the normal kick for another stroke’s kick (i.e. on back we used the dolphin kick and for fly we used flutter kick). Coach said this works on improving the coordination between arm and kick and I certainly found my second attempt in all four stroke drills did improve over my first try. For the main set Brad admitted his original plans had us doing only three 100 IMs but he decided on the spot since they were on 2:30 we could do an extra one for four. I was pretty tuckered out by this point but surprisingly discovered it was Damien, in fine form, who was the person against whom I pushed myself. At the end of every 100 medley after swimming hard the whole way I’d look over and, aside from the always present Ian lounging about, there was Damien looking right back at me. Warm down was a simple scull/swim set which I split equally between free and back. Just the sort of workout I’m looking for. Practice rating: 8/10