25 June 2022 With my planned open water race cancelled for Sunday due to high e coli levels, instead of taking today off, I decided to launch into about four weeks of more intense training with the hope of being able cobble together some decent racing in early August at the US Masters Swimming National Championships in my "growing up home town" of Richmond, Virginia. After a 3-4 km hikte, some shoulder-focused PT work, and light yoga, I went over to my LA Fitness where I ri

22 June 2022 I had written up this workout, a riff on a workout from 2012, and had intended to do it last Thursday, but my workout got cut short. This morning at my local LA Fitness, I plowed through this with a couple of modifications: Extended my warmup to 1,500 yards as I'm still feeling sore and tight from the weekend's long course pool racing on Saturday and ocean race on Sunday. I modified each round to add an extra 50 easy at the end. I added another 6 x 50 at the conc

19 June 2022 The red flags were up, the sea was "sporty" with the waves breaking big and strong, but the with Virginia Beach Lifeguard Association running today's "Jack King" One Mile ocean race, all of the 200+ swimmers felt safe to venture out into the rocking and rolling surf. My brother and I continued our "athletic bro" weekend, after his Olympic distance triathlon and my pool meet yesterday, riding beach cruisers down to 24th Street to check in and pickup our caps and t

14 June 2022 Though I have always ended up quite quickly returning to my beloved Speedo Vanquisher goggles, if there's one piece of swimming tech that I seem to be a sucker for, it's newfangled goggles. For example: Over the years, I've experimented with a number of different "open water" specific goggles that each promised a wider field of vision, all the better for sighting. While I still sometimes train with an early model of TYR's open water goggles, something even befo

16 June 2022 Whenever I come to my company's HQ in Bowie, Maryland, I like to stay at a basic Marriott Springhill Suites which has a double advantage of saving the company money versus the Westin where most of my colleagues stay and giving me a nice 20 minute walk to the wonderful Arundel Olympic Swim Center. I traipsed over there under ominous skies this morning, arriving right around 6:45am, planning for an hour long workout featuring my heart rate test set... only to be m

13 June 2022 After last week's monster volume (for me)., I am taking today off training other than light yoga as I look ahead to a fun weekend of racing down in Virginia Beach, with two events in one weekend On Saturday, I'll swim long course in Tide Swimming Masters' Big Kahuna Masters Classic, racing three events: Historically, I haven't raced much LCM, so much so that I've only done two meets since I turned 50, one in the summer of 2017 in Mesa, Arizona and the last one in

12 June 2022 I wrapped up this week with my 400 IM Test Set, the first time I've done it completely in a bit over 6 weeks. More impressive than the results was that I notched up 19,918 meters (or 21,783 yards) over my 5 swim workouts this week. That is the most volume I've swum in a week since moving to Canada (January 2019) and I have to go back to the week of January 18th, 2016 to find a week where I went more (and that was only slightly more at 22,250 yards). Comparing m

10 June 2022 My #swim #goal this morning was to make a right triangle, with two 1,000 meter legs and to see how close I could come to making the hypotenuse 1,414 meters. There is a perfect sight line from #OrrLake park for the first leg, heading towards both a two story house and a "cut line" in the forest on the hill on the north side. Heading west along the lake is another white house that stands out, but I had to divert from my straight(ish) line as I approached that as a

9 June 2022 ... stays together, even if they are far apart and only virtually swimming together. I come from a swimming family. My father grew up swimming in Florida and went on to swim at the University of Southern California in the early 60s; one of his brothers followed a similar swimming path and competed for the University of Pennsylvania. Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, I, my two sisters and my brother all swam competitively at various levels, with my sisters and I

7 June 2022 Just like yesterday's 5,000 yard workout, I looked back to early 2012, January 7th to be exact, to repeat an old school aerobic workout. I am picking up the volume up, both to get ready for a 5K open water race at the end of this month and to build a better base for racing of all kinds. This is definitely a grinder of a workout, so much so that when I did this in 2012, I bonked after the round of 4 x 200 and had to convert the 5 x 100 into an easy kick set. Afte