I'm not a fish

With my knee in a funk right now I've increased my pool workouts so that they are currently replacing all my riding! It's tough because I don't have fun swimming like I have fun riding. Swimming actually feels like a workout. Still, I put in three solid days of swimming this past weekend. Saturday I did a long distance day and just swam freestyle laps for an hour. Sunday I mixed it up and threw some backstroke in, but still did an hour. Monday I did some intervals. Intervals are always tough, but a really crucial part of working out. Intervals were always some of the toughest training days on my bike. You basically are trying to get your heart rate up to a REALLY high rate. You are working so hard that everything around you is a blur and even though snot may be dripping out your eyes, you can't do anything about it because you are so beat. You swear your watch is skipping chunks of time when it beeps warning that the rest period between sets is over. Glamorous huh?

I actually don't know my max heart rate for swimming. Different sports yield different heart rates. Cycling it's 184 but I've never been able to come close to that using a cross trainer eliptical at the gym and I bet it's even lower swimming. Up until this point with my pool workouts I've basically just always done straight laps. I don't entirely know what I'm doing when I try to design a swim workout but I read up a bit on the internet and after a good long warm up I swam 3X50 meters descending my time for each 50 by 2 seconds. I rested 20 seconds then and repeated 4 more times. By the last 3 50's my arms were dead tired. Then I tacked on a 25 minutes lap swim and did another interval for good measure. This one was "fun" too. I swam as hard as I could for one length, then two easy lengths, swam as hard as I could for 2 lengths and then did one easy length, then as hard as I could for 3 lengths and took a break before repeating and then cooling down.

If you have read all through this and are still awake you get a reward....Derek and I went for a short walk the other night so he could practice taking pics. It was a beautiful evening out.