School Time Nightmares

Monday night was the first practice after a two week Christmas break and finishing a few minutes of announcements Coach warned before the workout commenced that he hoped we had been doing ‘homework’ over the holidays and kept up with our swimming. That caused me to immediately flashback to my boarding school days – where not having one’s homework done brought disastrous consequences. Caning students was still in vogue back then. Actually, I realized with a sigh of relief, I had been doing my ‘homework’; at least I’d done a little over 20,000 meters in the two weeks we were away. Not enough of course but still a lot more than all but a handful of my teammates. And almost immediately after that thought I groaned because I had done some ‘homework’, 2,700 meters of it, the night before – including 6x100 back on 1:50, 600 meters kicking without flippers, and a combined 600 meters of fly and breast – and was still feeling it. At the time I figured our first night back would bring with it a fairly easy practice, and so wrote out what turned out to be a more difficult than usual practice set for Sunday (doesn’t it always seem easier to write a workout than actually swim it?). And here Brad was insinuating tonight’s workout would be tough. In the end it was hard but not crushingly so, though some in Lanes Five and Six would probably disagree on this particular day. Coach, clearly in a sadistic mood, released the workout in dribs and drabs to keep anxiety high:

12x50 free warm-up done in three sets of four (3 @ 0:50 + 1 @ 0:45)

4x100 free @ 1:50
4x100 kick (w/fins) @ 2:00
4x100 IM @ 2:00
1x100 free @ 2:00
3x100 IM @ 1:50

After finishing the last 400 meters both Doug and I figured at almost the very same instant we’d be seeing more declining IMs such as 1x100 free @ 2:00 and a 2x100 IM @ 1:40, and then 1x100 free @ 2:00 followed by a 1x100 IM @ 1:30; but Brad tripped us up and instead went:

4x100 free: first @ 1:50
second @ 1:35
third @ 1:30
fourth @ 1:25

Brad did give Lane Six the option of doing the set with the intervals ten seconds faster which we declined, but I did notice Doug pushing to finish the last hundred under 1:15. I was happy just to make the interval.

Choice of warm down (I did an easy 100 back)

Since we had a short hour to swim the 2,600 plus warm down the workout had a fair amount of meters in it. I know when we finished I was feeling pretty ‘wobbly’ in the legs. So it turned out I ended up rather roughed up despite the fact I had done my homework. Life really can be unfair.