Friday Night at the Races

I was curious to see what Joe had to say about our Friday Hyack practice so I waited until I could read his comments before writing this post today. “Friday’s swim practice was a fun one”, writes Joe. Well Lane Six begs to differ. There were groans all around when Coach Brad wrote down the workout on the board and his attempts to mollify the crowd weren’t particularly successful. “It’s not that bad”, said Brad, “the 10 & Unders I coach did almost this same workout and two of the girls swam every 25 under fifteen seconds”. Well we weren’t buying into that - the Hyacks have some national caliber junior age group swimmers; besides which not many who swim masters are willing to have success measured by bettering a couple of ten year old girls … or even worse, to fail at it.

So Joe liked the workout. Well Ian may say, “When the going gets tough the sprinters get out” but in this case there was plenty of bitching from our side for a change. And it wasn’t as if the set for us was materially different from Joe’s lane. Other than a slightly faster interval time for the 50s and the fact most of us opted to swim without fins (I swam the first two 25s with them and then went without them until the third round) all the lanes swam the same set. I hated it; there was no time to get into rhythm. Doug, one of our team stars who picked the wrong time to show up for his first Hyack practice of the season, complained about the havoc the sprints were causing with his asthma and then rhapsodized about doing something at least a hundred in length. And though Ian was his usual stoic self he didn’t hang around for the normal soak in the hot tub after practice – in fact virtually no one did. For only 2,200 meters it was a very difficult practice. I hate sprinting. Really I do.