Multiple days in November and December City of Barrie's Holly and East Bayfield Community Centres Masters Swimming Ontario has been doing a great job of putting together a few, simple, but motivational and fun virtual events this year. Their Virtual Open Water Challenge this summer was one of the two virtual events (the other being Intrepid Water's Build to Marathon event) that actually got me to do a solo 10K lake swim. Recently, MSO launched their "Not-Quite-Virtual Pool C

24 November 2020 LA Fitness - Barrie Cundles Road - 25 yards It's been about a month since I last did my Dave Salo's Pulse Plot test set (start reading on page 32, notated page 29 at this link for more details), so I repeated it this morning. Looking at the resulting pulse plot ... ... the goal is that, as your fitness level improves, you should see your pulse plot move in two directions, ideally at the same time - left to right (get faster) top to bottom (be fitter, measure

21 November 2020 LA Fitness - Barrie Cundles Road - 25 yards Anytime over the last few weeks I have done a workout after watching one of the International Swimming League "matches," I have had great performances of my own. This past Saturday, after watching Day 1 of the Finals where multiple world and country-level records were set, I headed over to my usual pool to repeat my 400 IM Test Set. Going into the water and even through most of my standard, "long" warmup of 1,750 y

19 November 2020 So desperate am I to swim in new pools, to have some semblance of normalcy again, to add something that approximates travel, that I'll go to any lengths to be able to swim in new lanes. Well, maybe not any lengths. As Canada is scaling the wall of the second wave of COVID-19, the concentration of new cases are in the Greater Toronto Area, so, rather than heading south towards the GTA, I'm willing to go north by northwest in Ontario, where there are both fewe

12 November 2020 I had fun this past Sunday taking my Saturday main set and doing it as a kick-only set, so I figured I'd do the same by switching yesterday's Broken Mile swimming to kicking today ... then I amped it up with an extra 400 kick for time. I was swimming yards at the LA Fitness Cundles pool, got in a quick semi-standard 1,000 warmup (400 IM kick drill, 4 x 100 descend free w/snorkel, 8 x 25 odds IM fast, evens easy) before this: 3 rounds of 3 x 50 on 0:50, w/fins

11 November 2020 My opportunity to add new pools to my 1001 pool list has been severely hampered by the pandemic. Not that I am complaining. I realize that I am extremely fortunate to have my family safe & healthy. I am so thankful that the company I work for has prioritized retaining staff, and is contributing to the fight against COVID-19. I am also grateful for the work that Swimming Canada and communities around Ontario have done to get pools opened and to provide way

... and that means I've got to get in shape for the MEMO (Marcia's Enthusiastic Masters of Oakland) 400 Kick For Time! I first did this fun, virtual event back in 2013, a year that I mostly spent with kicking and drills thanks to a shoulder issue, and have tried to enter it every year since. To completely fry my legs today, I took yesterday's main swim set and converted it to a brutal kick set, making use of my new Funky Trunks Beast kickboard: 4 rounds of a "400 kick hard"

November 7, 2020 Well, the City of Barrie Aquatic staff must have been reading articles like this ... ... and decided to double, triple, quadruple down on their investment in chlorine. At this morning's 8am workout at the East Bayfield pool, the chlorine levels were noticeably higher than even yesterday, when I felt it was a little elevated. At only 30 minutes into our hour long workout, I already had chlorine-cotton mouth and by the end of the workout could feel some defin

6 November 2020 I'll be the first to admit that my month of October was not the greatest training month in the pool. While I got to the pool a lot, work stress and the resulting sleep disruptions from said stress has made for some shoddy efforts in the pool. Things lightened up (a bit), though, at work over the last week and I've felt better and been more consistent. The sudden blast of heat the last couple of days after snow on Sunday certainly brightened my mood as I hea