September 27th, 2020 I got into doing a Broken Mile as a relatively routine test set / workout as far back as 2009 when I was back at my parents and dropped in with the fantastic Masters group at NOVA Aquatics. Not only was it like old home week swimming with guys and gals I had trained with back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was even more nostalgic as one of my old age group coaches, Mark Kutz, ran this Masters group. Mark was a creative coach when I was 12 and still had the

21 September 2020 As part of my return to pool training, with the distant dream of being able to compete sometime in the post-COVID-vaccine availability era, I am endeavoring to get back into a cycle where I repeat my favorite test sets every 4-5 weeks. This morning's effort at LA Fitness - Cundles Barrie location was my 400 IM test set, done in yards, begun with a shorter, 1250 yard warmup: 1 x 400: IM kick-drill by 25 4 x 100: on 1:30, descend free swim w/snorkle 2 x 100:

September 17th, 2020 It's taken me almost two weeks to feel like I had recovered after the glorious, but apparently hard on my body 10K lake swim. I've been in the pool pretty regularly since that time, but today was the day to officially kick-off my return to pool training with my 3 x 300 test set. I was at LA Fitness in yards, did the full warmup and then swam the 3 x 300 test set on a 4:00 interval: My best performance ever on this was back in December of 2016, when I wen

It's really odd that, for most of my adult life, I lived in a border state to Mexico ('85 to '89 in Texas, '97 to '18 in Arizona), but never actually went to Mexico ... until a business trip in late October of 2018. And, while it was one of the shorter business trips, it ranks right up there as one of my best ever trips ... thanks to people and pools! I was very fortunate to be staying in the Polanco neighborhood, steps away from the world-class Museo Soumaya, which I also g

Since I wrapped up my university swimming career back in 1989, I can count on two fingers the number of times I've swum more than 5 KM straight ... May 4th, 2012 - when I swam the ~9 miles (~14+ km) 'dam-to-dam' distance of Saguaro Lake outside of Phoenix as part of the 'tester team' for what has become the SCAR Swim Today - when I headed out to Orr Lake to swim 10KM by myself ... to prove to my 50-something self that I still have endurance and to enter both the Build to a Ma

One of the more ambitious of the many virtual open water events I have signed up for in the midst of these locked-down pandemic times is Shannon Keegan's Intrepid Water Build to a Marathon Virtual Swim Series. With the 2.5K and 5K handily accomplished over the last months, both in "skins" and in a wetsuit, the challenge for this month is the 10K. I am heading out tomorrow morning for my first attempt. With the shorter distances, I was easily able to accomplish them without